Please add iPhone 12/13 HDR color space support
Please ADOBE, I (and many others) are begging you to add proper colorspace support for HDR iPhone 12/13 videos.... It's been over a year since the issue was first detected and still no fix.... All iPhone videos look faded and are useless in premiere regardless of how you choose to interpret the footage


Hi all,
What are you experiencing is the lack of tone mapping in the current version of Premiere Pro (v23). Tone mapping is a way of making an image in one color space look good when it is displayed in another color space. By default, recent iPhone models shoot in the wide HLG color space. That looks great if you're looking at the footage on a display that supports High Dynamic Range. iPhones, iPads, many recent MacBook Pros, and most recent TVs support HDR. However, if you are looking at HLG footage on a Standard Dynamic Range monitor, the footage will look blown out and bad.
Using the Interpret Footage command to switch the footage to Rec.709 is a partial solution. As Elizabeth points out below, HLG iPhone footage interpreted to Rec.709 looks better but not as good as it does in Apple’s QuickTime Player. That’s because QuickTime Player is tone mapping the footage automatically, so it doesn’t look blown out and it still retains bright colors.
Tone mapping is currently available in the beta of Premiere Pro. More information about this is here:https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-pro-beta-discussions/now-in-beta-timeline-tone-mapping/td-p/13387919
We would love to get your feedback on how well tone mapping is working. Color is a science and an art, and your feedback on how tone mapping looks is very valuable to us.
Regards,
Fergus
P.S. I'm marking this issue as Completed, not because we are done, but because additional conversation about this issue should go into the beta forum I linked to above.
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Akira Chan commented
Based on Fergus first response, I tried opening the Iphone 13 HDR clips in quicktime (looks correct), exporting from quicktime, and then bringing into premiere - and the footage imports as Rec709 without any HDR issues. Extra step but works for our needs.
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Amanda Brewer commented
please make premiere pro color space compatible with iPhone 13s - the program is completely useless right now and can't be used
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Elizabeth Leonard commented
I also have this problem. Fergus, to answer your question, yes I watched that entire video. Changing the color space interpretation to Rec 2020 for the iPhone 13 clips helps somewhat. It brings them from "completely unusable" to "really quite bad, but I can turn this in for a school assignment." They're still not good enough for professional work (which I am not doing thankfully at the moment.)
I have attached a screenshot. The image on the right of all three of these pairs is the same - it's the shot as it looks in Quicktime. Not perfect camera work, but acceptable skin tones and good enough to turn in for school.
The top left image is what it looks like when the footage is brought into Premier 23.0.0 with no adjustments.
The middle left image is what it looks like with interpret footage -> Rec 709.
The bottom left image is what it looks like with interpret footage -> Rec 2020.
The images on the right look quite close to how they look in my phone.
This is a serious problem. Please include a correct color profile as soon as possible. This is 4K 60 FPS footage shot with an iPhone 13 Pro Max phone.
I tried all the possible settings and Rec 2020 was the closest.
Thank you!
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KELLY GUENTHER commented
Hey everyone, a quick fix -- if you have a Vimeo account -- is to wash and rinse in Vimeo. Upload the footage from your phone to Vimeo, and then download onto your computer and you are set. Also, if you shoot using Filmic Pro, the HDR footage doesn't have any of these problems.
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daniel ainsworth commented
Thanks for the info Fergus. Unfortunately, this doesn't really do the trick.
I'm gonna mangle the correct terminology here. But even when modifying/interpreting the footage correctly and making sure the timeline is set to the right colorspace, the footage certainly looks better - it looks well exposed, but the skin tones are sooo out of wack. A lot of green and yellow dominates all the images - and trying to manually correct with Lumetri doesn't cut it or Lumetri isn't fine enough of a tool to correct.
Lastly, opening the same files on my iMac in QuickTime interpret the footage nicely with nice skin tones. Being able to interpret the footage, in an Apple HDR space I imagine is what we're hoping for.
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KELLY GUENTHER commented
Oh Lord, yes.
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Hi Alex,
Does this video help?
Premiere Pro does support the color space the iPhone is using when recording in HDR; Karl's video explains how to take advantage of this.
Regards,
Fergus