Rec.2100 HLG to Rec.709 in Premiere Pro

What Rec.2100 HLG is, what each Premiere Pro color management setting actually does to the picture, and the choices that get HDR footage onto a Rec.709 timeline without clipped highlights or dead color.

To get Rec.2100 HLG footage onto a Rec.709 timeline in Adobe Premiere Pro: set the sequence Color Setup to Direct Rec.709 (SDR) in the Lumetri Color panel's Settings tab, check Input Tone Mapping under the sequence's Advanced settings, and confirm each clip's color space is detected as Rec.2100 HLG. That is the whole fix. The rest is knowing what each setting does to the picture, so you can choose on purpose instead of toggling until it looks right.

If you landed here because iPhone footage looks washed out, the short version of this post, with the iPhone specifics, is its sibling: iPhone footage looks washed out in Premiere Pro.

What is Rec.2100 HLG, in one minute

Rec.2100 is the HDR television standard: the Rec.2020 wide color gamut plus an HDR transfer function. HLG, hybrid log-gamma, is the broadcast-friendly one of the two transfer functions (the other is PQ). An HLG file stores highlight information far above SDR's ceiling and colors outside SDR's gamut. iPhones, many drones, and most mirrorless cameras in their HDR modes record it.

Rec.709 is the SDR standard your timeline, most clients and most screens still live in. The move from HLG to Rec.709 must throw information away: highlight range and gamut both shrink. Tone mapping is the art of throwing it away well. Skip it, and the picture displays washed out and desaturated. Do it crudely, and highlights clip to white.

Where the settings live in Premiere Pro

Adobe rebuilt color management in the rewrite that shipped with the 2025 release (version 25.x); the full guide to that system is Premiere Pro color management settings, explained. It now sits in the Lumetri Color panel, Settings tab, in three layers:

The order matters. A wrong clip-level detection poisons everything downstream, so check it first: right-click the clip, Modify, Interpret Footage, and confirm the HLG file reads as Rec.2100 HLG. Use Override Media Color Space only when detection is wrong. Overriding an HLG clip to Rec.709 to "fix" the washed-out look tells Premiere to display HDR code values as if they were SDR, which is the washed-out look, made permanent.

Which sequence color space should I use?

For SDR delivery, you have two sane choices, and they look different in the highlights.

Direct Rec.709 (SDR), with Input Tone Mapping on. Every source, HLG included, is tone mapped into Rec.709 as it enters the timeline. What you see is what exports. Highlights roll off smoothly, saturation is preserved, and Lumetri controls behave the way every Rec.709 tutorial assumes. This is the setting for most editors mixing iPhone or drone HLG with SDR cameras.

A Wide Gamut working space, tone mapped on output. The Wide Gamut presets keep sources in a large working space and convert to Rec.709 at the display and export stage. Grades hold up better under heavy pushing because the extra range is still there while you work. The cost is that everything on the timeline is being viewed through an output transform, and the preset flavours differ: the Tone Mapped preset compresses highlights gracefully, Minimal Tone Mapping preserves shadows and mids and lets extreme highlights compress harder, No Tone Mapping clips anything outside the output space. You can compare them live: Settings tab, Sequence, Advanced, switch the tone mapping method with the Program Monitor open. The full anatomy of that choice, input against output and what each method does to the highlights, is in Premiere Pro tone mapping explained.

If you do not have a reason to grade in wide gamut, take the first option. It has fewer moving parts and fewer ways to be surprised at export.

What does Input Tone Mapping do to the picture?

Input Tone Mapping is an input conversion, per clip: the Direct Rec.709 (SDR) Color Setup tone maps HDR and log sources as they enter the sequence, and the checkbox lives under the sequence's Advanced settings in the Lumetri Settings tab. In older 23.x and 24.x versions the same behaviour was the Auto Tone Map Media checkbox in Sequence Settings. For an HLG source on a Rec.709 sequence it compresses the HDR highlight range into SDR with a rolloff instead of a hard clip, and maps the wide gamut colors inward so saturation survives. Visually: the sky gets its blue back, skin stops looking gray, and speculars become bright-but-drawn instead of a white hole.

What it does not do: it does not grade, and it does not make two different cameras agree. It also is not magic in the extremes; a sunset that used the full HLG highlight range will lose some of its separation on the way down, whichever method compresses it. That is the format conversion being lossy, not a mistake.

Log footage rides the same machinery. S-Log3, Canon Log or Apple Log clips are auto-detected and normalised into the working space by the same settings layer. Log is a different beast from HLG, a camera capture curve rather than a display standard, and what that conversion means for grading is covered in log to display, what actually happens.

What about export?

Match the export to the sequence. For an SDR master out of a Rec.709 or tone-mapped wide gamut sequence: H.264 or ProRes with Rec.709 color, and leave the export color space at the sequence default rather than forcing anything. If the export looks different from your timeline in QuickTime Player, suspect display color management on the playback side before re-exporting; the file usually left Premiere correct.

Converted correctly, and the cameras still disagree

Everything above puts every clip into the same color space, correctly. What remains is that a correctly converted iPhone HLG clip, a correctly converted S-Log3 clip and a native Rec.709 clip are three cameras' different opinions of the same scene, now politely sharing a timeline. Conversion is per format. Matching is per camera, and it is the manual half of the job that Premiere leaves to your eye and the Lumetri Color panel.

That per-camera gap is what the MOVON panel closes inside Adobe Premiere Pro. Pick a reference, select the clips, and MOVON computes one grade per clip from each clip's own color data. Feed it the footage as shot; there is nothing to prepare and no list to be on. Which cameras and formats that covers is documented at camera support. The panel's job starts exactly where this post ends: after the color space is right and before the cameras agree. And if the word "matching" itself needs pinning down next to correction and grading, the three jobs are defined cleanly in what color matching in video is.

Common questions

How do I convert Rec.2100 HLG to Rec.709 in Premiere Pro?

Set the sequence Color Setup to Direct Rec.709 (SDR) in the Lumetri Color panel's Settings tab, check Input Tone Mapping under the sequence's Advanced settings, and confirm the clip is detected as Rec.2100 HLG. Premiere performs the tone-mapped conversion on input; no plugin is required in current versions.

Should I edit HLG on an HDR timeline instead?

Only if you deliver HDR. An Rec.2100 HLG sequence keeps the full range and looks right on an HDR display, but every SDR deliverable then needs its own tone-mapped pass, and mixing SDR sources upward brings its own conversions. For SDR delivery, convert on input and edit in Rec.709.

Why do my HLG clips look fine in the source monitor but wrong in the timeline?

The source monitor shows the clip through its own color space, the timeline shows it through the sequence's. If they disagree, the sequence settings are the ones misconfigured, usually tone mapping off or a wrong working space.

Is tone mapping the same as a conversion LUT?

They aim at the same conversion, but Premiere's color management does it from the clip's detected metadata and adapts per source, while a fixed conversion LUT applies one transform blindly and needs the right LUT per format. In current Premiere Pro, color management is the cleaner default; hand-applied conversion LUTs are the legacy route.

Does this apply to drone HLG footage too?

Yes. DJI and other drones recording HLG hit the identical mismatch on Rec.709 timelines and use the identical fix. Note the detection step especially; some drone files carry weaker metadata than iPhone files and need the override set by hand.