Color Management Adobe Premiere Pro

In Adobe Premiere Pro there are 3 color management menus to pay attention to.

Settings→Color

In this menu you’ll find the option to enable/disable Display Color Management. Enabling Display Color Management means Premiere will do the necessary conversions to ensure the image displayed in Premiere’s viewer adapts to the characteristics and color space of your monitor. This is equivalent to switching the ICC Profile on.

This option not always yields the expected results and the conversion might not be accurate. We encourage you to run some tests and see if the images displayed in Premiere look closer or not to what you see on other devices like smartphones, tablets and TVs with this option enabled. Based on that you can opt to keep it on or off.

Then make sure to match these same setting inside CineDream.

In Preferences/Color, make sure ICC Profile is checked if you chose to keep Display Color Management enabled in Premiere, and unchecked if you chose to keep Display Color Management disabled.

It is important to remember these settings are not changing your images, just how those images are displayed in the viewer. Changing these settings won’t change the grade or the look of the exported file.

The next menu to look at in Premiere is Project Settings→Color

Here we can change the Gamma of the project depending on your intended delivery. 2.4 for broadcast, 2.2 for web, 1.96 for quicktime.

Back to CineDream, in the Preferences/Color menu, change the gamma accordingly.

And finally, go to the Sequence Settings Menu

Make sure the sequence is set to Rec709 as CineDream works in Rec709 by default.

After reviewing these 3 Premiere menus and setting CineDream accordingly, both the CineDream viewer and Premiere Viewer/Monitor should match perfectly.

If you notice that your log footage shows transformed to Rec709 inside Premiere without ever doing any color correction, it means Premiere is applying a LUT or color space override onto your footage based on its metadata.

We don’t want this as CineDream is designed to handle all your color space management and it is expecting to get the native image untouched. To disable any Premiere conversion, select all your clips in the Project panel, right click and go to Modify/Color.

Make sure no input LUT is applied and the used color space is Rec709, with Override Media Color Space disabled.

With the color management settings matched between CineDream and Adobe Premiere Pro you can expect a 1:1 match.