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Color Shift in Premiere
Creating this thread to document on-going overtime thread about some issues with plug-ins and potential color shift issues in Premiere.
We created a short tutorial to locate where things are in Premiere UI (link at bottom). First here’s a short summary
1. A long long time ago we used to have problems with Auto-Color, Auto-Contrast and Auto-Levels
These did not work when an effect after them requested two frames from the current time (also sometimes known as temporal processing, term we will use here), effect such as DEFlicker, DE:Noise, RSMB, Twixtor… These effects have been moved to the deprecated list. The updated list of deprecated effects is here: Obsolete Effects, Transitions and Presets removed (adobe.com). For example, recently Fast Color Corrector has been added to that list and in 2025 automagically the project is changed to replace that when loading an older version project.2. Then Adobe bought Iridas SpeedGrade that eventually progressively became Lumetri in Premiere. Up to 2022, we also had issue with Lumetri effect applied before our temporal processing effect – it broke projects – solution was to apply Lumetri after
This was fixed in 2023 but a new issue arise for certain clips requiring user to turn off Auto-Tone map in Sequence Settings3. In 2024 initially (up to 2024.6) there was a color shift issue with temporal processing plugins requiring users to go to the Lumetri Color panel Settings tab and set Viewer Gamma to something else than Broadcast gamma 2.4. This was fixed in 2024.6 but there is still an issue with some clips such as Sony S-Log type videos. In some cases simply setting Sequence settings to High Bit Depth and on PC set Mercury Engine to CPU can fix this (Mercury Engine CPU not an option anymore on Mac ARM computers). On Mac with a few clients, upgrading to 2025 was the only solution (note still make sure Sequence Settings is set to High Bit depth on).
4. 2025: There is still an issue with the new Wide Gamut color management. A bit like 2023 issue, do not set it to Wide Gamut (Tone Mapping) mode – other modes work. Wide Gamut Tone Mapping affects ALL our plugins (color shift) last we checked. Check if Premiere when uploading an old project has set this to Custom.
5. It’s been reported that we might also have an issue with HLG input (e.g. an export option on iPhone when shooting HDR) being investigated. We suggest to not use HLG in sequence settings unless you do have an HDR source, but Rec 709 or rec 2020 sequence settings appear well behaved.
Workaround for Premiere Pro color shift issue (youtube.com)
Heard about our big Raffle?: https://conta.cc/48bb8BW