Accurate colour for web delivery

Making your Colour Grade match from Resolve to Premiere to the Web

TLDR; When working in Gamma 2.2, Adobe Premiere’s latest update fixes colour management and solves the gamma-shift issue when exporting videos for the web.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock (in which case welcome, not sure how you found this), you’ll know that most content is getting delivered to the web and social media these days. Most broadcast commercials now have online versions and sometimes they're more important! The problem is that colour management for the web is much more complex than the traditional broadcast TV standard. If you’ve ever opened your video in different players and web browsers you might get a headache from how much they can vary.

Today we’re trying to solve one particular problem: what happens to a grade after it’s been sent from DaVinci Resolve to Adobe Premiere and then exported to the web and social media.

This is a very common situation for us and our clients who often want to do the final online & export from Adobe Premiere. Without colour management you will end up viewing your hard work on YouTube and wondering why it looks washed-out, lifted and bright.

This has been an issue for years, and here at Gradient we have solutions to this but they’re not as simple as we’d like and they’re a compromise. So today we’re testing leaning further into a fully Rec709 Gamma 2.2 workflow, from a Gamma 2.4 one. Spoiler: it works but not for the reason we intended!

Some Context

Before we get started it’s important to say this is not a deep dive into colour management and gamma-shift problems, but instead an attempt to find a practical solution for 1 specific everyday problem.

We’re also not getting into video players like Quicktime today because that’s a whole other issue (in short: don’t use them without testing).

If you want a great overview of colour management check out Cullen Kelly’s blogpost on FrameIO.

Want to go deeper down the rabbit hole? Here’s the bible of colour management tests:

This is also not an exercise in scientific pixel-peeping, as Cullen Kelly most aptly says:

The goal is to give the greatest number of viewers the most faithful reproduction possible of the creator’s visual intent.

So further in this post when I describe an image as ‘matching’ or ‘correct’, I do not mean pixel perfect because there unfortunately is no such thing when publishing to the web. What we’re looking for is something that is very close and a good representation of what the colourist was viewing.

Ok onto the tests.

The Old Way

Currently we use the traditional Rec709 Gamma 2.4 standard for our project settings and this is what our reference monitor is calibrated to. This works great for broadcast but not so much for web delivery, you will get a gamma-shift where the image is brightened and lifted. Without getting too technical it’s because most online platforms & browsers want to display something closer to sRGB or Gamma 2.2.

To compensate for this we use colour space transforms in DaVinci Resolve to export an image that is much better represented online. The problem comes when Adobe Premiere is used in between. Now we’ve lost some control over the process.

THE PIPELINE

There are 4 crucial stages to this image pipeline where we want our image to match:

1. DaVinci Resolve & Reference Grading Monitor

This is our North Star, our carefully calibrated Reference Monitor needs to give us confidence. It is running through DaVinci Resolve.

2. Client Review Links

How are the client reviewing the grade? If it’s review services like Vimeo or FrameIO you need to ensure they match your grading monitor.

3. Adobe Premiere Pro

We offer Online Editing services but many of our clients like to finish things in-house. Crucially we want the grade to look the same in the Premiere viewer as the grade they approved.

4. Web Delivery

This is wherever the final export is uploaded to for viewing. Whether that’s Instagram, Youtube, TV or all of the above. Arguably it is the most important but also the most overlooked part of the pipeline because of its complexity.

What happens if you grade in Rec709 Gamma 2.4 and do not colour manage for a web delivery:

DaVinci Resolve - Looks correct. This is our reference.
FrameIO Client Review - Looks incorrect, washed out.
Adobe Premiere - Looks correct & matches Resolve.
Web Delivery (YT/Instagram/Vimeo etc.) - Looks incorrect, washed out.

As you can see above, the gamma has lifted resulting in an image that is brighter, has less contrast and less perceivable saturation. This is obviously not ideal. It’s all very well and good having a perfectly calibrated monitor but if the audience views something different it’s not much use.

The Fix

To solve this, we use colour space transforms and corrective LUTs at different points of the process to make our exports match what we’re seeing in Premiere & Resolve. While this works it’s fiddly and involves more work for the client, not our goal!

Here’s what happens if you grade in Rec709 and DO colour manage for a web delivery:

DaVinci Resolve - Correct.
FrameIO Client Review - Transformed to 2.2 on export. Looks correct (within reason, browsers can vary)
Adobe Premiere - 2.2 Transform is taken off and delivered to client. Looks correct in Premiere.
Web Delivery (YT/Instagram/Vimeo etc.) - Client uses 2.2 LUT on export. Looks correct when uploaded.

As you can see, this is a faff and a fuss. Some version of this is always necessary when delivering to broadcast and web, but what happens if you’re only delivering online content? Is there a better way?

The New Way

With the above solution we are effectively working in a Gamma 2.2 workflow, but does anything improve if we formalise this further and actually work and monitor in Gamma 2.2 rather than just using corrections?

Here’s how we’ve setup our project in Resolve now:

Our reference monitor is also setup to display Gamma 2.2 so we should have more consistency throughout. This can also be done through Resolve Colour Management, it will give the same results.

We exported Prores and H264 files and here’s what happened:

DaVinci Resolve - Correct.
FrameIO Client Review - Correct (Yay!)
Adobe Premiere - Correct!
Web Delivery (YT/Instagram/Vimeo etc.) - Corre - no wait that’s brighter. Incorrect (boo!)

As this point I was unsurprised but still disappointed. Adobe Premiere can read the colour space metadata so it’s displaying correctly here but when it exports it just treats everything as standard Rec709 and we have our old problem.

Unfortunately the Premiere stage is the part we have the least control over so it’s the hardest to solve. It involves compensating and most importantly it involves work for our client. Things weren’t looking great until a solution rained down from a creative cloud…

Premiere to the rescue (?!)

Going into this I didn’t see Adobe as the potential heroes, they were the least likely. I thought I would be the hero to be honest, but it turns out smarts can’t compete with someone just plain fixing their software.

Previously Premiere had extremely limited colour management options. It was either Rec709 or HDR, nothing more granular than that. On October 10th Adobe released a new version of Premiere Pro that solved pretty much everything. When trying to solve this problem I came across this page and my jaw dropped, I’d never seen these settings before!

I immediately updated Premiere to version 24.0 and there they were in all their glory: sweet colour management settings. They're still classically Adobe: kinda hidden and weird but they’re there.

Could this be a fix? I played around with some of the options, they do not make it obvious what’s happening and the hierarchy is certainly confusing. But there is one option that fixed everything.

In the Lumetri Color > Project settings is a dropdown for ‘Viewer Gamma’ and you can now change this from ‘2.4 (Broadcast)’ to ‘2.2 (Web)’.

In my Premiere sequence I had 2 Prores files, one exported in 2.4 and one in 2.2. With stock settings Premiere displayed these identically, but once I changed the viewer gamma to 2.2, now they displayed differently as they should!

A very exciting start but surely it doesn’t fix exports? Well you’re wrong there buddy because it does.

Ok let’s try this one more time:

DaVinci Resolve - Correct (Project 2.2, Monitor 2.2)
FrameIO Client Review - Correct
Adobe Premiere - Correct (Version 24.0, Viewer Gamma 2.2)
Web Delivery (YT/Instagram/Vimeo etc.) - Correct (Rejoice!)

All of a sudden the pipeline is fixed from end to end. With one setting change we can all be happy and have nice things (just don’t open anything in Quicktime or you’ll cry).

Conclusion

Colour management can be a nightmare and there’s still a lot of issues, but for once we have a win. Something that makes our jobs just a little bit easier.

Do I wish this setting was easier to find? Yes, it will take a tiny bit of explaining but it’s a much cleaner and more satisfying solution than corrective LUTs or transforms.

So reader, if you’re a colourist with a similar problem. Maybe considering switching to a 2.2 workflow for web deliveries, and if you’re a production company or post-house doing your online edit in Adobe Premiere, I urge you to download the latest version (crashes be-damned this is worth it!) And switch to 2.2 for web deliveries, but talk to your colourist first!

For now I’m happy, and you’re probably confused. But isn’t that all that matters? For today there’s a brief respite from colour management madness for this particular colourist. Looking forward to the next issue! (Stop looking at me Quicktime).

SUMMARY;

Adobe Premiere Pro’s latest update fixes it’s export gamma-shift problem
In Lumetri Color Settings, change the Viewer Gamma to 2.2 (Web) and your export will look correct online
For Web-only projects, Gradient will now work and deliver in Gamma 2.2 and help our clients to change this setting in Premiere for consistent exports.