I use the compensation gamma lut to export from premiere so that my final video doesnt look washed out.
You are misconstruing the situation ... assuming that all other users will see this as you see it on your very specific Mac rig, while you are using X browser and YouTube. I'm a PC person, and near guarantee that almost any gamma correction LUT you apply to make it look good on your system will make it look worse on mine, or any other PC/Android screen out there.
This whole thing misses the most basic understanding of color/tonal corrections in "published" video post production. Which is ... no other system will ever show exactly the same image you see. Pro colorists deal with this as a daily issue, and the only accepted method of handling this with pro colorists is to setup a proper calibrated & profiled monitoring system to guarantee the viewing system is as close to standards as possible.
Then between the viewed image and their scopes, they can guarantee an accurate pro image.
But when that image goes of Into The Wild, whether film release, broadcast, or streaming, every screen it is shown on will be different both from what the colorist 'saw' and how every other screen shows it.
Which is to be expected ... but their material will, relatively on every screen, look like other pro produced material on that screen and viewing situation.
So the first question ... is your system a full color correct system?
That's easy to answer ... no, not even close.
First, computer monitors are not considered even close to Grade 1 Reference monitors such as the Flanders FSI, Eizo, and high-end Sony b-cast monitors.
Second, those spendy reference monitors are never 'fed' a signal from a GPU or normal computer connection. They get a "clean" output from a Blackmagic or AJA card designed to get the image from the application without any operating system muckups including ICC profiles.
Most of us don't work on those systems, and hey ... a "cheap" reference monitor is north of $5,000USD. Add in several hundred for the card to get the signal out of the computer, an external LUT box for holding the calibration setup for the monitor if it doesn't store mulitple internal calibration LUTs for another near-grand or so. "Adequate" calibration gear. Over $6,000 just for the reference monitor, not even talking about the computer and the working/UI monitors attached to it. That's a chunk of change.
So ... ok, we're not going to have that, so how do we get as close as possible?
That ... varies. On a Mac, you're dealing with the ColorSync utility, which has changed several times in the last few years as to how it applies 'standards' to video media, so different generations of Mac gear/OS can do different things to the image shown. That's confusing enough. And means that different Mac users may see a very different image from the one you see.
On PCs, well ... we don't expect Microsoft to actually apply things like color standards correctly so we PC folks tend to understand we have to make things proper ourselves. But doesn't really help make it easy to set up ... usefully.
But no matter our system, our viewers will be looking at the images we produce on all sorts of screens, in all sorts of viewing conditions. Their screens, their viewing environment. What the heck do we do?
Setup a system as close to the standard as possible, understand where your system doesn't match the standard, and adjust for that problem.
The basic need is for users to see something that looks as close to other professionally produced media on the system they are viewing it on. This is a very relative thing. No matter how we set our system, a user with a greenish screen will see a greenish version on their viewer. We have no control of that.
And understand the specifics of your situation ... just because, on your particular Mac, something exported out of Premiere with any particular setting and uploaded to YouTube looks 'right' to you on X browser, doesn't mean that anyone else on the planet will see what you're seeing. Ever.
If you can, get something you've worked to a colorist or local broadcast station. Some public broadcasting stations can be helpful I've been told. Have them check it on their systems, and run it through their QC machines if possible. On a proper system, what's your produced media look like?
Other than that, you've no idea how close or far you are to being within 'normal' for viewing on other systems.
Neil
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