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The Lumetri Color workflow in the current 26.x release, where your own LUTs belong, and how the Color mode beta and the announced 27.0 changes fit in.
To color grade in Premiere Pro today, select a clip, open Window > Lumetri Color and move down the panel from top to bottom: Basic Correction for white balance and any log conversion, Creative for a look, Curves and HSL Secondary for individual colours, then Color Wheels & Match to line shots up with each other. That order mirrors how a grade is built in any app: correct first, then style.
Adobe’s help pages now call the app Adobe Premiere, though most people still search for Premiere Pro. These steps follow version 26.5.2, the latest release in Adobe’s notes as of October 2026. Adobe is testing a new Color mode in Premiere (beta) and has said the Lumetri Color panel retires in 27.0, so there is a section on that too; check your version against it. If you only need one clip graded, our online colour grading tool skips the project setup, and what is color grading explains the correction-then-look order in more depth.
Choose Window > Lumetri Color, then click the clip in the timeline so the panel edits it. Park the playhead on a frame that represents the shot, ideally one with a face or something neutral in it.
For log footage that colour management hasn’t already handled, pick the camera’s conversion LUT in Input LUT (Browse loads one from disk). Then click the White Balance eyedropper on something that should be white or grey and refine Temperature, Tint and Saturation. Auto, with its Intensity slider, gives a quick first pass if you prefer.
Under Creative, choose a Look from the thumbnail viewer or browse to your own LUT, and lower its Intensity until it sits naturally. Vibrance, Saturation and the Shadow Tint and Highlight Tint wheels fine-tune the mood.
In Curves, use RGB Curves for contrast and Hue vs Sat, Hue vs Hue or Hue vs Luma to adjust one colour range. HSL Secondary isolates a colour by its hue, saturation and lightness for bigger changes, such as cooling a sky without touching skin.
Open Color Wheels & Match, turn on Comparison View, choose a reference frame and click Apply Match. Leave Face Detection on when people are in shot; the result is written into the colour wheels and saturation, so you can adjust it afterwards.
The top section handles the technical fixes. Input LUT applies a conversion LUT before anything else, which is where a camera maker’s log-to-Rec.709 file belongs. Auto is Adobe’s automatic colour and tone correction; Adobe says it works on log clips too, and the Intensity slider scales it back. White Balance holds the eyedropper with Temperature, Tint and Saturation, and the tone sliders below it shape contrast.
Look loads a creative LUT or one of Adobe’s presets, with its own Intensity. Underneath, Faded Film, Sharpen, Vibrance, Saturation, the Shadow Tint and Highlight Tint wheels and Tint Balance let you split-tone without leaving the panel. Vibrance is gentler than Saturation on colours that are already strong, which usually includes skin.
Curves pairs RGB Curves with five hue and saturation curves: Hue vs Sat, Hue vs Hue, Hue vs Luma, Luma vs Sat and Sat vs Sat. Each has an eyedropper that drops three points around a colour you click, which is the quickest way to grab one hue. Color Wheels & Match holds three-way wheels plus the shot-matching tools. HSL Secondary builds a key from hue, saturation and lightness for a targeted correction, and Vignette shades or lightens the frame edges.
Browse works for a one-off, but LUTs you use often can sit in a folder Premiere reads at launch. Adobe gives these locations for the current user: on a Mac, ~/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common/LUTs; on Windows, AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Common\LUTs inside your user folder. Inside it, files in a Creative subfolder appear in Creative > Look, and files in Technical appear in the Basic Correction Input LUT list. All-user folders exist too and need administrator rights.
Since April 2026, Premiere (beta) has had a dedicated Color mode, opened from the Color tab next to Edit at the top left. It replaces the timeline with a Clip Grid and builds grades from operations in a Color Controls panel: every clip starts with an Adjust operation, and Style operations add modules such as Film Color, Contrast Kit and Flare. Grades can live on a clip, a custom group or the whole sequence.
Adobe’s help pages say that from Premiere 27.0 the Lumetri Color panel is retired. The Lumetri Color effect stays, applied from the Effects panel and edited in Properties, so old grades still open. A new Color Management panel takes over log and raw transforms and offers a Rec. 709 pipeline or a new Wide-Gamut pipeline. As of the release notes updated on 5 October 2026, 27.0 hadn’t shipped; if your copy reports version 27 or later, follow Adobe’s current pages rather than the panel steps above.
Premiere colour-manages recognised log and raw media automatically, with tone mapping and gamut compression, under a setting now called Color Manage Auto Detected Log and Raw Media. The default Color Setup preset is Direct Rec.709 (SDR), and wide-gamut presets such as Wide Gamut (Tone Mapped) are available. For a clip it misreads, Override Media Color Space sets the source manually. If colour management is already converting a clip, adding a conversion LUT in Input LUT converts it a second time, which shows up as crunchy, over-saturated contrast.
The usual way to share a look across many clips is an adjustment layer above them with Lumetri Color on it, created from the File menu or the Project panel’s New Item button in most versions (check yours, as Adobe’s 2026 pages don’t spell out the path). Keep per-clip correction on each clip and the shared look on the layer, so changing the look later is one edit.
For a single clip, the browser tool on colorgrade.video covers the same ground with nothing to install. Pick white (W) neutralises a colour cast like the Lumetri eyedropper, the Footage menu converts many camera log formats, Wheels, Curves and HSL handle the shaping, and Match colours (M) pulls a clip towards a reference frame or still. The video stays on your device throughout.
You can also carry a grade into Premiere. Export .cube (Shift+L) saves the grade as a LUT at 33 or 65 points; drop it into the Creative LUTs folder above, or load it with Browse under Creative > Look. Spatial effects (Grain, Vignette, Halation, Bloom) can’t live in a LUT, so recreate those in Premiere if you used them. All of our looks can be exported this way as free LUTs.
In Lumetri Color, use Basic Correction > Input LUT for a technical conversion (such as log to Rec.709), or Creative > Look for a creative look; both offer Browse to load a .cube from disk. To keep LUTs in the menus permanently, copy them into the Adobe Common LUTs folder for your system.
In Color Wheels & Match, turn on Comparison View, set the reference frame, keep Face Detection on if there are people in shot, and click Apply Match. The match is written to the wheels and saturation for you to refine. Note that the Color mode beta has dropped this Clip Match feature.
Use one for a look shared by many clips, and keep corrections on the clips themselves. A layer applies the same change to everything below it, so it can’t fix a cast that only one shot has.
Let colour management do it: recognised log and raw clips are converted automatically, and Override Media Color Space handles the rest. If you prefer a LUT, load the camera maker’s file in Input LUT, but not on top of colour management, or the clip is converted twice. Our log to Rec.709 page lists the official LUT sources.
Adobe says it retires in Premiere 27.0. The Lumetri Color effect stays and is edited in the Properties panel, and a Color Management panel handles log and raw. The October 2026 release notes still listed 26.5.2 as current, so check your version.
Adobe describes Auto as a Sensei feature that analyses the frame and sets the Basic Correction sliders. It’s a quick draft; the Intensity slider scales it, and you can refine every slider afterwards.
Yes. colorgrade.video grades a single video in your browser for free with looks, wheels, curves, HSL and LUT import, and nothing is uploaded. Use Export .cube if you later want the same grade inside Premiere.