If you're cutting for film, color has always been something you manage with the finish in mind. You temp in the edit, but you know a proper grade is coming later. That usually means working fast and avoiding anything that won’t translate once you hand off your project to be edited by a separate grading application.

That model creates a gap. You are making creative decisions in the edit, but…

Most color problems don’t start in the grade—they start in how the project is set up. Mixed color spaces, hidden transforms, and assumptions about how footage should behave all add up. Once that foundation is off, every decision that follows becomes a workaround.

Color Mode in Adobe Premiere (beta) is meant to address that, but it only works if the sequence is set up correctly from the…

In this episode of the No Film School Podcast, NFS tech editor Jourdan Aldridge sits down with Adobe’s Jason Druss at NAB 2026 to discuss Adobe Premiere’s new Color Mode, a three-year effort to rethink color grading for video editors.

The conversation covers why Adobe rebuilt its color pipeline, how Color Mode differs from Lumetri and traditional pro-color tools, and what editors can expect…

What’s that? Adobe has rolled out a major new update for its flagship video editing software, featuring a totally new feature set, and this new direction has nothing to do with AI. Are we dreaming?

In perhaps the biggest non-AI swing that the company has made in a long time, Adobe has introduced Color Mode, a first-of-its-kind color grading system in Premiere (beta) designed from the ground…