| Image: Adobe |
Adobe is continuing the flow of video news from the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show with its announcement of a new “Color Mode” for Premiere. The company says it’s a “first-of-its-kind color-grading experience,” designed to be approachable for video editors, rather than professional colorists.
The mode will live as its own tab in Premiere, alongside Import, Edit and Export. Activating it brings up a new interface with a large preview window and several tools for adjusting things like color temperature, saturation, contrast and more. You can apply your adjustment, or multiple adjustments, to a single clip or to all (or most) clips in your sequence, and use masks to apply adjustments only to certain parts of your video. Color mode will also pre-select the most prominent hues in your image, so you can quickly and easily adjust them.
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| Image: Adobe |
The tool will include several pre-made “Style Presets,” which have their own adjustable parameters. You’ll also be able to save your customized version of a style as its own preset, so you can easily apply it to other footage later. You can use the tools to build those presets on their own, to go beyond basic color grading as well.
Adobe is pitching the mode as an exercise in simplicity; something designed for editors, rather than professional colorists. Rather than tweaking numerical parameters, drawing custom curves on graphs or sitting at a physical piece of hardware with an ocean of knobs and dials, it seems like you mostly control the tools through a simple mouse-based interface that lets you drag controls until you get the look you’re going for.
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| Color mode’s simple interface doesn’t preclude more advanced edits, like masking. Each tool also includes a “heads up display” window that pops up to show you how your edit is changing the color. Image: Adobe |
However, the company also says the system “grows with your ambition,” letting you do more complex grades if necessary. Still, it seems the main appeal is its ease-of-use, with Adobe’s press release calling it an alternative to unnamed other apps that “pull you out of your edit entirely and force you to study out-of-reach pro-colorist tools that were never designed for you.”
In the same vein of making things easier for editors, Adobe has also released a new program called Frame.io Drive, which lets you “mount” your projects stored on the cloud as storage media on your computer. From there, you can access and clips or files directly from your computer’s file manager, without having to manually download or sync them.
Color Mode is available in the beta version of Premiere starting today, while Frame.io Drive will “roll out in phases,” starting with enterprise users.