Inside Adobe Premiere’s Color Mode with Architect Alexis Van Hurkman

Detailed Summary

Patrick opened the conversation, setting the context. Adobe rarely re-does a color tool, and when it does, the work tends to come out in increments. Color Mode is not an increment. It is a re-thinking that has been more than three years in the making, and the Mixing Light contributors brought the questions every working colorist has been asking out loud since the public preview shipped. Alexis Van Hurkman, who needs little introduction inside our community, joined us from Adobe as the guest of the session.

The New Adobe Color Mode

Alexis articulated the mission first. Color Mode is not Lumetri with a fresh coat of paint. It is a re-thinking of what a color tool inside a non-linear editor should look like when the goal is, in his words, “more people making prettier pictures and having fun while they’re doing it.” The first impression is deliberately approachable – global controls that read at a glance the way an Instagram filter would – but Alexis was clear that progressive disclosure is the architectural choice underneath. Newcomers see what they need. Working colorists peel back to find depth that, in some areas, exceeds what Lumetri ever offered.

Is Lumetri Being Replaced?

Patrick pushed on the obvious question. Yes and no. Lumetri remains available as an Effect inside the Effects Control Panel for backward compatibility, so existing projects open and grade as expected. The Lumetri panel itself is gone in the Beta (and future) versions when Color Mode is enabled. Alexis explained the technical reason without hedging – many of Lumetri’s adjustments clip in ways that worked for Rec.709 but break under wide gamut.

Several Lumetri features, including the HSL qualifier, auto color, and control surface compatibility, are still in development inside Color Mode and were acknowledged as known gaps.

Is Adobe Color Mode Ready for HDR?

This was the longest technical exchange of the session. Alexis walked the Mixing Light panel through Color Mode’s tone-mapping behavior, the recent addition of inverse tone mapping, and the design assumption that wide-gamut is the native workflow.

“All of the tools that we’ve built for Color Mode really work the best in wide gamut,” he said. “You can use them in Rec.709, which is the traditional Adobe workflow, and everything works just fine, but you still have to manage your clipped highlights and your clipped shadows.”

Inverse tone mapping is now available but is not yet optimized across all tone-mappers supported by Color Mode. Alexis was candid that this was harder to ship than he originally expected.

Is Adobe Focusing on Non-Pro Users?

Alexis defended Color Mode’s Instagram-like resemblance. It is not a compromise to professional workflows, in his framing. It is a recognition of the audience for a color tool inside Premiere.

“We didn’t just build this for pros,” he said. “We built this for editors who need to do some color because they’ve got a fast turnaround project, or – I don’t even have access to a colorist. I’m a content creator, and I can’t afford that.”

The accessibility is not at the expense of depth. The same Color Mode that hides the Zone System behind a clean global-controls front end exposes those zones the moment a user wants to drive them.

Why No Lift, Gamma, and Gain?

Alexis traced the historical shift in colorist behavior. The industry has been quietly moving away from lift, gamma, and gain for years. Even colorists who have those controls available often migrate to offset and zones when given the option, in part because the math behind lift, gamma, and gain stops behaving the way you want under HDR and wide gamut.

FilmLight’s Baselight and DaVinci Resolve’s offset-based controls were both acknowledged influences on Color Mode’s design. The zone system is, in Alexis’s framing, “global controls with no lift, gamma, gain, that is the simplest thing you can give people,” with the curve math still sitting underneath rather than being thrown away.

Zone System

This was the centerpiece demo. Alexis screen-shared and walked through how zones auto-analyze a clip, how multiple zones interact, and how the pivot control unlocks contrast adjustments without exposure shifts.

The pedagogical message, repeated twice during the demo, is always to start with the global controls:

“Don’t think, oh, I’m going to stretch image contrast by raising the highlight zone and dropping the shadow zone, because you’re not going to get the same smooth result that you’re going to get with the contrast and integrated pivot control.”

Neil Haugen, speaking from his beta-test experience, confirmed that after a project’s worth of zones, he had stopped using exposure control entirely, replacing it with contrast and pivot.

Hardware Support

Patrick again raised the question about the hardware control surface. Tangent panel support is on the roadmap. Alexis shared a design truth most colorists already know: control surfaces work better with zones than with curves:

“Anyone who’s tried to use control surfaces with curves knows that it’s pretty limited,” he said. “You just get an arbitrary division of curves. I can do better with zones.”

He also clarified the philosophical position behind pivot. It is a creative tool, not a technical control anchored at 18% gray. That is a deliberate departure from color-science orthodoxy and, in his opinion, is consistent with the broader accessibility mission Color Mode is built around.

Creating Complex Presets

Alexis demonstrated the preset system. Multiple style presets stack and ‘look’ modules combine. The UI progressively discloses advanced options without overwhelming newcomers.

The practical takeaway for working colorists is that once you have a look you trust, you can save it as a preset that respects the same wide-gamut assumptions Color Mode bakes in. The preset does not lock you into the gamut you authored it in, which removes one of the more common headaches of cross-project look libraries.

Order of Operations and Pivot Point

This is the technical heart of the conversation. Alexis spent considerable time on screen demonstrating how contrast and pivot interact differently in Rec. 709 Direct versus a wide gamut working space. In Rec. 709, the response is linear. In wide gamut the same control produces an S-curve, with smooth highlight and shadow roll-off.

Layer tone mapping on top, and exposure starts to behave more like gamma.

The implicit message is that Color Mode’s controls are not fixed in their behavior. They adapt to your color management choices, which is sophisticated but takes time to internalize. Alexis closed this section by saying:

“When we finish the job of making wide gamut the way you want to work all the time, exposure is going to scratch that itch for you. And then you’ve always got the zones to fall back on.”

Final Thoughts

Alexis closed with unusual candor. He said he expected the worst coming out of the gate.

“I was expecting pitchforks at the Colorist Mixer,” he said, and instead found that users who invested even two hours inside the tool came back with a surprising amount of appreciation.

He credited the cross-functional team that built Color Mode and named Neil Haugen specifically as one of the long-running private beta voices who shaped the design.

Patrick wrapped the session by tying it back to Mixing Light’s broader mission – the Color Mode story matters because it expands who gets to participate in the craft, not just who gets a shinier interface.