The latest version of Adobe Premiere Pro (v25.2.1) has a totally revamped color engine. Which is excellent, actually. But, if you are shooting iPhone video, when you load that clip into Premiere, it will look, ah, terrible.
Fortunately, there’s a quick fix.
By default, modern iPhones shoot HDR HLG media. However, when we import that video into Premiere, it looks awful. (Well, it would look great if you looked at it on an HDR monitor, but most of us don’t have one of those.)
The reason is that Premiere is trying to display HDR media as HDR on an SDR computer monitor. However, what we want, in most cases, is to display our HDR media as SDR (also called “Rec. 709”) video.
Fortunately, you don’t need to change each clip. You only need to change one setting for the sequence.
Edit one or more iPhone clips into the timeline.
Switch Workspaces (top red arrow) to Color (lower red arrow). You’ll find the Workspaces icon in the top right corner of the Premiere interface or as a list in the Windows menu.
Change Output Color Space for the sequence from Rec. 2100 HLG to Rec. 709 (red arrow).
Done.
Once the color space is set, you can color grade your clips as normal.
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One Response to Quick Color Tip for iPhone HDR Video in Adobe Premiere Pro
Being stuck in a PC environment right now, I’m not seeing much HDR, but it makes me wonder: how much are people delivering in HDR color for web? I assume if iPhones are setting the trend for shooting in HDR, it’s starting to pick up steam on YouTube and Vimeo, etc., but I imagine there are a number of conversion issues and such. Just curious what Larry, you and your website users are experiencing.