Mastering the Lumens: Your Ultimate Guide to HDR Video Grading in Premiere Pro

HDR video grading in Premiere Pro: turning good footage into unforgettable images

HDR video grading in Premiere Pro is where your footage stops looking “pretty good” and starts feeling truly immersive. Instead of squeezing everything into the limited contrast of SDR, a modern HDR video grading workflow in Premiere Pro lets you show dazzling highlights, deep, detailed shadows, and rich color that still feels natural. In this guide, we’ll walk through a practical Premiere Pro HDR workflow from project setup to final export, using Lumetri Color, scopes, and HDR metadata so your HDR video grading doesn’t just look bright—it looks controlled, cinematic, and intentional.

If you’d like a head start on your look, this workflow pairs beautifully with cinematic LUTs. You can drop a LUT from a video LUT bundle over your HDR video grading in Premiere Pro, then refine with Lumetri Color for a polished, professional finish. For example, you might test a filmic LUT from a 700+ Cinematic Video LUTs and then fine-tune it as part of your Premiere Pro HDR workflow. To explore even more looks, you can browse a broader Video LUTs collection and take advantage of the Buy 3, Get 9 FREE offer by adding 12 products to your cart.

HDR vs SDR: why your images suddenly feel more “real”

In SDR, you’re essentially printing your moving images onto a small strip of dynamic range: bright skies clip early, deep shadows turn to mush, and skin tones often sit in a narrow band of midtones. HDR video grading in Premiere Pro opens up that range. A sunset shot can hold texture in the sun itself while still showing detail in a subject’s dark jacket; a city skyline at night can maintain bright neon signs without crushing the streets into pure black.

Think of it this way: SDR is like drawing with a 12-pack of crayons, while HDR hands you a huge box of carefully calibrated pencils where each step in brightness and color is more finely controlled. When you follow a structured Premiere Pro HDR workflow, you’re not just making things brighter; you’re building depth, shape, and mood through controlled contrast and color.

I noticed this most clearly when I graded a nighttime city sequence: in SDR it felt flat and gray; once I switched to an HDR video grading workflow in Premiere Pro, the neon edges, reflections on wet asphalt, and subtle gradients in the sky suddenly felt like real life instead of a recording.

Setting up an HDR project in Premiere Pro the right way

The biggest mistakes in HDR video grading usually happen before you touch a single Lumetri slider. If your sequence, footage interpretation, or monitoring are wrong, you’ll fight with your images the entire time. Here’s a step-by-step foundation for a solid Premiere Pro HDR workflow.

1. Choose the correct HDR working color space (Rec.2100 HLG vs PQ)

When you create your HDR sequence, you’re choosing how Premiere Pro will treat brightness and color throughout the project. In Sequence > Sequence Settings, set the working color space to an HDR standard under the Video section:

Rec.2100 HLG (Hybrid Log-Gamma) is great for broadcast, mixed workflows, or when you need more graceful fallback on SDR displays.
Rec.2100 PQ (Perceptual Quantizer) is the preferred choice for high-end streaming platforms and HDR10 mastering, giving you very precise control over luminance and tone mapping.

Adobe’s own HDR workflow documentation for Premiere Pro explains how Rec.2100 HLG support is designed for broadcasters working with HDR content end-to-end, and how PQ can be used for more cinematic deliverables. Choosing one up front and sticking to it is essential; changing the working color space mid-grade will alter how every Lumetri adjustment behaves.

2. Interpret Log and HDR footage correctly

Your camera may capture HDR or Log (S-Log, C-Log, V-Log, LogC, etc.) with its own color space and gamma curve. Premiere Pro can guess, but it’s safer to be explicit:

Right-click a clip in the Project panel and choose Modify > Interpret Footage.
In the Color Management section, set the Color Space and Gamma to match how the footage was recorded.
For HDR-capable footage, make sure you’re not accidentally forcing it into Rec.709, which will flatten highlights and compress your dynamic range.

This step alone often solves the “my HDR video looks flat and washed out” problem. When your inputs are tagged correctly, the rest of the Premiere Pro HDR workflow falls into place much more smoothly.

3. Grade on a calibrated HDR display

Grading HDR video on an SDR screen is like adjusting exposure while wearing sunglasses. To trust your HDR video grading in Premiere Pro, you need:

An HDR-capable reference display that supports your chosen standard (HLG or PQ).
Proper OS and GPU configuration so the system outputs HDR correctly.
A calibration pass (with a probe) to align peak brightness, black level, and color primaries.

Adobe’s guidance on setting up HDR and tone mapping workflows in Premiere Pro stresses that HDR monitoring must be configured correctly at the OS, GPU, and application levels to avoid mismatches between what you see and what the file actually contains. Once this is dialed in, you can make grading decisions with full confidence.

HDR video grading in Premiere Pro with Lumetri Color

Once the technical groundwork is set, Lumetri Color becomes your main control room for HDR video grading. The tools will look familiar if you’ve graded SDR before, but the range and sensitivity are different, so you’ll want to adjust your habits.

Start with balanced exposure and contrast

In the Basic Correction section of Lumetri Color, your first goal is a clean, balanced image:

Use Exposure to place your midtones in a natural range where skin tones and key subjects feel believable.
Use Contrast to give shape and depth to the image without crushing blacks or blasting highlights.

HDR lets you push exposure further than in SDR before things break, but you still want discipline. A good Premiere Pro HDR workflow treats these controls as a way to “seat” the image in a comfortable range rather than maxing them out for drama.

Recover detail with Highlights, Shadows, Whites, and Blacks

Next, refine the extremes:

Highlights and Whites let you recover or shape bright regions like clouds, specular reflections, and practical lights.
Shadows and Blacks help you open up dark corners while keeping true blacks where you want them.

In HDR, these sliders can reveal surprising detail that would be completely gone in SDR. On a wedding reception shot, for example, you might pull back Highlights slightly to keep candle flames clean, then lift Shadows just enough to show subtle detail in a dark suit without losing the moody atmosphere.

Use curves and color wheels for refined HDR color

Curves and color wheels become even more powerful in HDR because you’re working across a larger, more precise brightness and color range:

Use the RGB Curves to create gentle S-curves that add contrast without nuking highlight detail.
Use Hue vs Saturation to selectively tame oversaturated neon signs, skies, or foliage.
Use Lift / Gamma / Gain color wheels to nudge shadows, midtones, and highlights into more cinematic palettes—warm skin, cooler shadows, and neutral whites.

In my own HDR grading workflow, I often start by dropping in a filmic LUT from a 700+ Cinematic Video LUTs bundle, then fine-tune skin tones with Hue vs Hue and Hue vs Sat curves. When I tested this approach on a drone sunset shot, the LUT gave me a beautiful base look, and a couple of careful curve tweaks brought the sky and water into a rich, balanced HDR rendering that still felt believable.

Keep saturation under control

The wider color volume in HDR means you can easily overshoot saturation. A solid Premiere Pro HDR workflow aims for “expensive natural” rather than “radioactive neon”:

Use Vibrance to add color subtly to less saturated areas without destroying skin tones.
Use Saturation sparingly; small changes go further in HDR than SDR.
If a color channel feels too intense (like saturated reds in traffic lights), tame it with targeted curves instead of globally desaturating the entire image.

Using Lumetri Scopes like a professional HDR colorist

HDR video grading in Premiere Pro is almost impossible to do consistently by eye alone. Lumetri Scopes give you objective feedback on luma, chroma, and hue, and they can be switched to an HDR view so you see values in nits instead of 0-100 IRE.

Configure scopes for HDR

Open Window > Lumetri Scopes and enable scopes like Waveform (Luma), Parade (RGB) and Vectorscope (YUV). In the scopes panel menu, choose an HDR scale so that your waveform reads up to higher nit values (for example, up to 1000 or 10,000 nits depending on your monitor and mastering intent). Adobe’s official documentation on Lumetri scopes walks through how to choose and interpret scopes, including HDR options and scale settings.

Read brightness and color like a pro

On the waveform, watch that your bulk midtones sit in a comfortable region, while highlights roll up smoothly instead of slamming into the top.
Use Parade to balance RGB channels so whites are neutral; if the red channel is much higher, your image will feel too warm.
Use the Vectorscope to keep skin tones around the skin-tone line, even when you push stylized color elsewhere.

If you want to go deeper on scopes and waveforms in Premiere Pro, internal blog posts like Unlocking Cinematic Magic: Your Ultimate Guide to Lumetri Color Mastery can pair nicely with Adobe’s official reference.

Related HDR grading resources

HDR vs SDR workflows and manual grading vs LUT-based looks

HDR grading in Premiere Pro vs SDR grading

Dynamic range: HDR workflows preserve significantly more highlight and shadow detail, whereas SDR often forces you to choose between sky detail and subject exposure.
Contrast strategy: In HDR, you often aim for smoother highlight roll-offs and richer midtones instead of crushing blacks just to gain perceived contrast.
Delivery considerations: HDR exports need proper metadata and target displays; SDR is more forgiving but can’t reach the same level of realism.

Manual HDR grading vs LUT-driven workflow

Manual HDR video grading in Premiere Pro gives full control and is ideal when matching cameras, dealing with tricky lighting, or building a unique look from scratch.
LUT-driven workflows are faster: you apply a cinematic LUT as a “look layer,” then refine exposure, contrast, and color underneath and above it.
A hybrid approach works best in practice: use LUTs from a curated pack such as a 700+ Cinematic Video LUTs as a creative starting point, then fine-tune manually to suit each scene.

If you enjoy building your own looks from the ground up, you can even combine this HDR video grading in Premiere Pro workflow with color-grading guides such as Unlocking Cinematic Magic: Your Ultimate Guide to Lumetri Color Mastery or articles on building a consistent color style for your channel. These topics pair well with HDR workflows because they focus on look-building rather than just technical compliance.

Exporting HDR video from Premiere Pro without nasty surprises

The final step in any Premiere Pro HDR workflow is export—and this is where many otherwise beautiful grades fall apart. Get this part right, and your HDR video grading will look consistent across supported displays.

Choose an HDR-capable format and preset

In File > Export > Media (or the Export workspace), pick a codec that supports HDR (for example, HEVC/H.265 with 10-bit depth). Then select an HDR preset that matches your working color space (HLG or PQ/HDR10). Adobe’s official guide for creating and exporting HDR videos for platforms like YouTube walks through the exact steps for choosing and customizing HDR presets.

Set HDR metadata correctly

HDR metadata tells the display how to interpret your file. In the export settings:

Confirm the color space (Rec.2100 HLG or Rec.2100 PQ/HDR10) matches your sequence.
Set your Max Luminance to the peak brightness you graded for (often around 1000 nits for many workflows).
Set Min Luminance to a reasonable black level (often close to 0 nits).

For some delivery platforms, you may also need to embed mastering display and content light level metadata; check the latest specs of your target platform and align your export settings accordingly, referencing Adobe’s export settings documentation for up-to-date details.

Converting HDR to SDR with tone mapping

When you need SDR versions of your HDR grade, don’t simply re-export in Rec.709 and hope for the best. Use tone mapping or a Color Space Transform workflow:

Apply a color space transform effect (or use Premiere Pro’s tone mapping features) to convert from Rec.2100 HLG or PQ down to Rec.709.
Check highlights on scopes to ensure they’re not clipping or flattening into a dull gray mess.
Make minor adjustments in a separate SDR-focused Lumetri layer to bring back contrast and saturation appropriate for SDR displays.

A practical HDR grading checklist for Premiere Pro

Here’s a condensed checklist you can keep next to your monitor while working through an HDR video grading session in Premiere Pro:

Confirm your camera footage’s color space and gamma; interpret clips correctly in the Project panel.
Create an HDR sequence using Rec.2100 HLG or PQ, and stick with that choice.
Set up an HDR-capable, calibrated reference monitor and enable HDR scopes.
Balance exposure and contrast in Lumetri’s Basic Correction section.
Refine highlights, shadows, and black/white points to maximize detail while preserving shape.
Use curves and color wheels to sculpt color and contrast, then carefully adjust saturation and vibrance.
Monitor your adjustments with waveform, parade, and vectorscope in HDR mode.
Apply cinematic LUTs from curated preset packs only after your base grade is stable, then tweak as needed.
Export using HDR-capable formats, correct color space, and carefully set HDR metadata.
Create SDR versions with tone mapping and verify on both HDR and SDR displays.

If you want to deepen your color knowledge beyond HDR, you can explore broader color-grading guides such as Unlocking Cinematic Magic: Your Ultimate Guide to Lumetri Color Mastery or articles on building a Consistent-Color Style for Your Channel. These topics pair well with HDR workflows because they focus on look-building rather than just technical compliance.

When you’re ready to push your HDR grades even further, consider upgrading your preset toolbox. Collections like a 1000+ Master Lightroom Presets Bundle (for stills and thumbnails) plus cinematic video LUT bundles can keep your photo and video branding aligned. And remember, you can Buy 3, Get 9 FREE by adding 12 products to your cart across presets and LUTs, which is ideal if you’re building a full ecosystem of looks for travel films, weddings, and YouTube content.

FAQ: HDR video grading in Premiere Pro

Do I really need an HDR monitor to grade HDR in Premiere Pro?

Yes. You can approximate decisions on an SDR screen, but accurate HDR video grading in Premiere Pro requires an HDR-capable, calibrated display. Without it, you can’t reliably judge highlight roll-off, peak brightness, or subtle shadow detail.

Should I choose Rec.2100 HLG or PQ for my HDR workflow?

Use PQ (HDR10) for most cinematic streaming deliverables and tightly controlled viewing environments. Use Rec.2100 HLG when you need better backward compatibility with SDR and when your content is likely to be broadcast or watched on a wide range of consumer TVs.

Can I convert my HDR grade to SDR inside Premiere Pro?

Yes. Use tone mapping or a color space transform to convert from Rec.2100 HLG or PQ down to Rec.709, then refine contrast and saturation in a separate SDR-focused grade. Don’t just export the HDR timeline as SDR without any conversion; you’ll likely get washed-out, low-contrast images.

Where in the workflow should I apply LUTs?

In a clean Premiere Pro HDR workflow, start by correctly interpreting footage and building a neutral base grade. Then apply LUTs (for camera corrections or creative looks) and refine with curves and color wheels, always checking your scopes so the LUT doesn’t push values out of a comfortable range.

Why do my HDR exports look different on YouTube or streaming platforms?

Differences usually come from mismatched color spaces, missing or incorrect HDR metadata, or the platform’s own tone mapping. Double-check that your sequence settings, export color space, and HDR metadata all match, and follow up-to-date guidance from your target platform to minimise surprises.

Written by Asanka — creator of AAAPresets (10,000+ customers).