Adobe Premiere Pro 25 adds new color management, Properties panel & more

The latest beta of Premiere Pro brings major some significant color management and performance updates to help editors deliver video projects at speed.

The latest beta of Adobe Premiere Pro 25, due out next month, has an entirely rewritten color management system that the company says transforms raw and log formats from nearly every camera into consistent footage instantly upon import. And, perhaps more to the point, it does it without requiring LUTs.

As anyone who has gone anywhere near any footage in recent years is all too painfully aware, there are dozens of raw and log formats, each with their own unique characteristics. While coping with all this is baked into the skillset of professional colorists, many editors could do with a system that gives them their results with a bit less input.

Here are the headlines:

• An entirely new color management system that automatically transforms RAW and log footage from nearly every camera into great-looking SDR and HDR, so users can spend less time managing LUTs and start editing right away.
• A new wide gamut working color space that’s vastly larger than Premiere’s HD Rec.709 working space in which all image processing operations are performed. This new wide gamut color space leverages Hollywood’s industry standard ACEScct with high-fidelity tone mapping that provides the kind of color and fidelity results that were previously impossible with Premiere Pro. 
• Six simple “set-it-and-forget-it” presets in Sequence Settings and Lumetri color settings let users work in traditional Rec.709 for legacy projects or the new wide gamut color ACEScct with ease. 
• Most-used effects, like Lumetri, are now color space aware with smoother and more flexible control for refining skin tones, balance, and creative looks when working in a wide-gamut preset. 
• Consistent color and brightness when using Dynamic Link to send clips to and from Adobe After Effects for motion design and compositing. 

New Properties panel

Adobe has also introduced a new Properties panel. This takes the most popular effects, adjustments, and tools and puts them all into an easily surfaced and context-sensitive panel. The idea is that it shows editors everything they want to adjust and hides anything else based on the media type selected in the timeline—whether it’s video, audio, graphics, or captions. This reduces mouse travel, provides fast access to relevant panels for advanced work, and eliminates the need to search and navigate multiple panels to get to the needed tool. 

In this case a video really is worth 1000 words, so here it is:

Further adjustments

There’s more too. The latest version also has more hardware acceleration, resulting in faster playback for codecs such as AVC and HEVC. ProRes exports are now up to 3x faster too.

There is also increasing support for more Canon, Sony, and RED cameras so users can import native files.

Canon: Premiere Pro now supports the EOS C400, EOS C80, EOS R1, and EOS R5 Mark II.

RED: Premiere Pro support for the Extended Highlights feature of the RED V-RAPTOR XL [X] and V-RAPTOR [X] cameras has been added, designed to capture more color and detail in the extremely bright portions of your image.

Sony: Import and directly edit media from all of the Cinema Line cameras including the FX3, FX6, as well as Sony’s line of high-end CineAlta cameras including the VENICE 2 digital cinema camera and the new BURANO.

Lastly, Premiere Pro also has a new design with two dark modes, a light mode, and high-contrast accessibility mode. Users also get cleaner fonts and typography for better legibility and consistency with other Adobe Creative Cloud apps. 

All in all, it’s a fairly significant new release. You can download the Premiere Pro beta here.

tl;dr

• -Premiere Pro's latest beta version brings significant color management and performance updates to improve video project delivery speed.
• The new version features an entirely rewritten color management system that can transform raw and log formats from nearly every camera into consistent footage instantly upon import, without requiring LUTs.
• It introduces a new wide gamut working color space and six simple presets for easy color management.
• The update also includes a new Properties panel for easily accessing popular effects, adjustments, and tools based on the media type selected in the timeline, along with improved hardware acceleration for faster playback and increased camera support.