Lumetri Crushing Blacks since Premiere CC Pro 2018+, is there a fix?

[Al Jensen]

I installed Premiere 2021 (15.2) and blacks are still broken in Lumetri compared to 2017 and earlier. It continues to be totally unusable so far as I can tell.

Following these posts by Neil you can kind of work around it, but it’s still not consistent and requires doing it all from scratch for every single source:

https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-pro/lumetri-limitations/m-p/#M59055

If anybody wants to test, here’s the clip I’m using in the example picture, which is from a Lumetri color grading tutorial, so you know it should be fine:

https://we.tl/t-ndVtX3hnZM

All I’m doing is intentionally exaggerating the differences by setting Highlights, Shadows and Whites to 100 and setting Blacks to -100, but even without exaggerating Premiere 2021 is significantly worse than 2017. (See my original posts for pictures of the Lumetri panel if that helps).

No matter what format, what source, etc, the blacks get crushed and the image gets destroyed (and sometimes turns purple?). I feel like I’m taking crazy pills because color grading via Lumetri is not really possible in its current incarnation and yet other people are doing it every day so I must be missing something. I would happily pay for support to help resolve this issue in an easy to replicate manor if anyone has any suggestions of where I could go to do that.

Thanks!