Premiere Pro vs DaVinci Resolve for Color Grading - is Adobe Taking the Lead as Best Video Editor?

The Adobe Premiere Pro vs Davinci Resolve battle for the best video editing software continues to heat up. While Final Cut Pro might have been the most popular option in the 2000s, Adobe’s Premiere Pro took a major leap forward in the early 2010s and has held steady since. However, DaVinci Resolve has been on the rise for several years now and has narrowed the gap.

This is largely due to DaVinci Resolve’s color grading, editing and management features having been superior. (Plus, having a free option for beginners certainly doesn’t hurt either.) Yet, in the wake of some major new updates unveiled at IBC 2024 in Amsterdam, it appears that Adobe is taking a step forward in its own color management and editing tools.

Let’s take a look at what’s new in the latest beta version of Premiere Pro and explore what it could mean for the battle for color editing—and video editing in general—supremacy.

Latest Beta updates to Adobe Premiere Pro

Before we explore all of Premiere Pro's current (and future) color management tools and features, let’s examine some of the bigger updates Adobe announced for its popular NLE at IBC 2024.

Alongside the color management features, these updates are focused on providing faster performance and a design refresh. If you check the beta version of Premiere Pro (which any user can do right now), you’ll see a fresh, modern look.

With more hardware acceleration, editors should have faster playback for popular codecs like AVC and HEVC. Premiere Pro will also reportedly perform up to three times faster overall and receive support for more cameras (like the more recent options from Sony, Canon, and RED).

With the new design refresh, users will now have the option to switch between dark and light modes, as well as a high-contrast accessibility mode. You can also further customize your user experience to better suit your editing goals.

New Properties panel in Premiere Pro

We should also mention that Adobe has also revealed a new Properties panel in Premiere Pro tailored specifically to help beginners and newbies to the NLE better navigate the most basic editing functions.

With this new Properties panel, available in the beta version of Premiere Pro, you can view some of the more popular effects, adjustments, and tools in one panel that contains many helpful tips and information.

Furthermore, in this Properties panel, users will now be able to do things they’ve never done before in Premiere Pro, like crop video directly from the Program monitor or highlight and adjust the properties of multiple clips or graphics simultaneously. 

Premiere Pro color management

Now, on to the new color management controls and features. With more digital cameras today than ever before, properly calibrating all of your workstations and workflows for your footage requires quite a bit of knowledge and experience.

Adobe aims to make Premiere Pro a more comprehensive one-stop editing workspace. It will combine practical cuts and timeline editing with the more advanced features of a color management solution. To this end, the new Adobe Premiere Pro color grading feature will make it easier to work with raw and log formats natively within Premiere.

Users can now see their awesome-looking footage as soon as clips are dropped into the timeline without spending additional time adding in LUTs. Here are all of the new color management updates coming to Premiere Pro:

• An entirely new color management system that automatically transforms RAW and log footage from nearly every camera into great-looking SDR and HDR, so users can spend less time managing LUTs and start editing right away.
• A new wide-gamut working color space is vastly larger than Premiere’s HD Rec.709 working space, in which all image processing operations are performed. This new wide-gamut color space leverages Hollywood’s industry standard ACEScct with high-fidelity tone mapping, providing the kind of color and fidelity results that were previously impossible with Premiere Pro.
• Six simple “set-it-and-forget-it” presets in Sequence Settings and Lumetri color settings let users easily work in traditional Rec.709 for legacy projects or the new wide gamut color ACEScct.
• Most-used effects, like Lumetri, are now color space aware with smoother and more flexible control for refining skin tones, balance, and creative looks when working in a wide-gamut preset.
• Consistent color and brightness when using Dynamic Link to send clips to and from Adobe After Effects for motion design and compositing.

You can check out the complete documentation for more information.

DaVinci Resolve color management

We’d be remiss if we didn’t take a minute here to discuss Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve, which is the chief competitor to Adobe’s Premiere Pro these days for video editing. DaVinci Resolve does color really well—management, correction, and grading are all handled very well in the app.

DaVinci Resolve’s color page lets users manipulate color in creative and artistic ways that dramatically affect a scene's mood, making it an incredibly powerful part of the storytelling process. 

With Resolve, users get support for various formats, including wide color gamut and HDR images, and DaVinci’s legendary 32‑bit image processing for high-quality, professional results. You can also balance and match footage from different sources to create unique images that are impossible to create with other systems.

Adobe Premiere Pro vs Davinci Resolve: Which editing software is right for you?

Ultimately, though, if you’re just starting with video editing and trying to decide which is the best video editor for you, then it honestly would be worth trying both Premiere Pro and Resolve and seeing which one feels better for you.