Color mode in Premiere (beta)

Learn more about how Color mode improves workflow by enabling tailored color adjustments for accessibility and personal preference in Adobe Premiere (beta).

What is Color mode for?

No sequence is complete until its color is adjusted to ensure every clip looks its best and supports the intended visual style for your program. This can range from color correction and balancing exposure, contrast, and color to color grading, where you create a specific look and feel for your project.

Color mode in Adobe Premiere (beta) is designed to make color work accessible and efficient, even if you’re new to color adjustment. At the same time, it provides the depth and control needed for detailed corrections and advanced grading workflows.

The interface is streamlined to help you stay focused on the image. The default layout maximizes the Color monitor, reduces distractions, and surfaces only the tools you need. Dedicated color panels, available only in Color mode, help you work faster and more precisely than in Edit mode.

No sequence is finished until its color has been adjusted, ensuring each clip looks its best and aligns with the intended visual aesthetic for your program. This is true whether you’re simply doing color correction, adjusting the contrast and color of each clip in a program to look its best, or color grading, where you’re also developing a specific visual style for a program to give it some flavor.

Color mode in Adobe Premiere (beta) has been designed to be accessible to editors who aren’t necessarily experienced with color adjustment, to make it as easy and fast as possible to learn how to adjust every clip in your sequence to look its best. However, Color mode has also been built to provide the full functionality necessary for users at every level to make highly detailed improvements, as well as the broad stylistic enhancements necessary to prepare any edited sequence for delivery to the audience in its best form.

Whatever your level of experience, the Color mode has been purposefully built to provide a streamlined and uncluttered color adjustment experience. Learning how to examine and evaluate the image is the most important skill necessary for successful color, and Color mode has been carefully designed to keep your eye on the picture as you work. The default layout deliberately maximizes the size of the Color monitor, minimizes other onscreen distractions to only what’s essential to guide you through the process, and provides color-specific panels that aren’t available in Edit mode to accelerate your color workflows.

Key features in Color mode

Clip Grid

The Clip Grid, available only in Color mode, makes it fast to select any clip for sequence navigation and immediate adjustment. It has many functions that help you organize your work via Filter and Sort, manage color operations via Copy and Paste, and make complex selections quickly in order to create groups for grade management.

Color Controls panel

The Color Controls panel has been designed to expose maximum color adjustment functionality within minimum space, so you spend more time making changes and less time opening collapsed groups and scrolling around to find what you need.

In fact, the Color Controls panel exposes every color control corresponding to the currently selected operation that’s available to modify the currently selected clip. These color controls have evolved significantly, simplifying their appearance and enabling adjustment of two related image characteristics at once by dragging them vertically and horizontally. The result is even more fluid and artistically satisfying images, making techniques previously considered complex or advanced easier to learn and faster to use.

Color monitor

Color monitor has specific features to facilitate color workflows. For example, you can switch between Sequence and Clip playback modes in the time ruler to either navigate the entire sequence quickly (in Sequence mode) or focus deeply on the clip at hand without accidentally navigating to another clip (in Clip mode). 

Use Solo mode to temporarily disable overlays and composited elements, so you can evaluate your adjustments without distractions.

Color management

Color mode is designed to work on sequences using Color Management. This is meant to give you the best starting point for grading clips in all supported color spaces, log-encoded, or raw. With Color Management, you’ll get great results using the Direct Rec. 709 (SDR) color setup that’s the default for most new sequences.

As you experiment, you may also want to try the newly improved Wide Gamut (Tone Mapped) color setups to see the differences in workflow. The default Tone Mapping and Gamut Compression settings have been improved to work correctly with graphics and SDR media using the new Apply Inverse Tone Mapping and Gamut Compression checkbox in the Advanced settings. 

No matter which color setup you use, every feature in Color mode has been designed to make grading and delivering HDR output a pleasure, so try choosing either the Rec. 2100 HLG or PQ output color spaces and using all the available Adjust and Style tools to grade HDR highlights if you have an HDR display you can use.

About Public Beta

While Color mode is nearly feature complete, it’s still a work in progress, and there are a few new features and refinements yet to come, such as HSL keying for masked isolations, additional Style modules, and various other targeted enhancements.

However, the end-to-end workflow is fully operational, so we invite you to try it and share your feedback. Feel free to reach out on the community beta forums.

How should I test this?

This is a beta release, and development is ongoing and some issues can arise from time to time. When these happen, please use the bug reporting mechanism to voice your issues. It's not recommended to do client work just yet. Ongoing refinements to Color mode at this stage may impact project formats, so consider every project you create that uses Color mode to be potentially disposable. For the best experience, import duplicates of projects with sequences you want to test with, or import new media into a fresh project. 

Premiere (beta) Project Compatibility

While it's possible to open a project created in Premiere (beta) with Color mode and open it in Premiere 26,.x this isn't recommended, as you won't be able to access any of the beta features in the shipping version, including the new color effects in each clip, group, and sequence operation. Given the magnitude of the changes in this particular beta of Premiere, we don't recommend moving projects freely between versions.

it's recommended that you use duplicate projects with sequences that you'd like to work with for learning and testing Color mode, and we strongly advise against using this public beta for critical client work.

If you do open a Premiere (beta) project in Premiere 26,.x you'll be warned about missing color effect and sequence color effect video filters. If you continue, you'll notice that graded clips contain an offline filter corresponding to the color effect. The safest thing you can do in this instance is to quit without saving and reopen this project in Premiere (beta).

Color mode replaces the Lumetri panel

While the Lumetri Color effect remains available in the Color Correction bin of the Effects browser, the Lumetri panel has been replaced by the Color Management panel to support the Color mode. Previous projects using Lumetri will import correctly and appear as before, with total color fidelity. If you want to continue making Lumetri color adjustments or adding more Lumetri Color effects, you can do so using the Effects Control panel.

Avoid using Lumetri Color and Color mode together

If you’re beginning a new project, we encourage you to use Color mode without also using Lumetri Color effects. The Lumetri Color effect has several disadvantages compared to Color mode, including:

Avoid mixing Lumetri Color with the Color workspace, using Lumetri often restricts your grading options in the dedicated Color mode.

Quick color features in Edit mode

If you want to make quick color adjustments in Edit mode, the Properties panel has a new Color section with a set of basic correction controls. These adjustments work in conjunction with Color mode to provide you with a seamless experience. You can make simple and fast adjustments to fix issues with individual clips in Edit mode, while using the streamlined workflows in Color mode to quickly grade your overall sequence with more creative controls. 

Clip Match removed

The Clip Match feature from Lumetri and the clip Comparison Mode of the Monitor in Edit mode have been removed.