The story of Adobe’s new Color Mode in Premiere (beta) doesn’t begin with a feature roadmap or a product brief. It begins with a challenge for Alexis Van Hurkman that wasn’t supposed to be taken seriously.

To understand why that matters, it helps to understand who Alexis Van Hurkman is—and for whom his involvement actually changes the stakes: Adobe as a platform, professional colorists, and the much larger population of editors who have historically been underserved by existing color tools.

Alexis is not simply a product manager or a product designer stepping into color. He is one of the more influential figures in modern digital color workflows. He has worked as a professional colorist, authored widely used training materials and books on color correction, and, critically, has been directly involved in building color tools themselves. His work at Blackmagic Design on DaVinci Resolve—particularly around HDR grading tools—helped shape how a generation of professionals think about manipulating images.

That combination is unusual. Most tool builders are not high-level practitioners, and most practitioners are not deeply involved in designing the systems they use. Alexis sits at that intersection. He understands both the underlying math and the practical friction of real workflows.

That context makes his skepticism more pointed. When he arrived at Adobe via the Frame.io acquisition—Alexis was initially outside the Premiere video team—and had no interest in working within existing constraints. He wasn’t trying to improve Lumetri in Premiere, and by his own account, he didn’t want to be involved with it at all. The existing system, both technically and conceptually, didn’t align with how he believed modern color tools should work. So when he was asked by a colleague what color tool he would build, he didn’t treat it as a request to refine what existed. He treated it as permission to ignore it entirely.

That mindset is what set Premiere Color Mode in motion.

In what Alexis describes as a “clandestine meeting,” he was pulled onto the team by Fergus Hammond, a product manager on the Premiere team. Fergus asked a deceptively simple question: “What would you build if you could do anything?” The premise itself sounded unrealistic. Large companies don’t usually give that kind of freedom, and Alexis assumed—based on experience—that whatever he proposed would eventually be constrained by legacy systems, internal priorities, or compatibility requirements.

So Alexis approached the problem differently. He assumed the Premiere team would say no. And that assumption changed everything.

Instead of trying to improve what already existed, he treated the exercise as a blank slate. What if color tools had never been shaped by decades of hardware constraints? What if there were no inherited metaphors from telecine panels, no entrenched UI conventions, no obligation to preserve the way things had always been done?

That question is more radical than it sounds. Nearly every professional color tool today—curves, lift/gamma/gain, node graphs—is rooted in historical limitations. They are not purely conceptual systems; they are translations of physical workflows into software. Remove that history, and you are no longer iterating. You are redesigning the problem itself.

Alexis leaned into that freedom. He imagined a system built around what is possible in today’s workflows rather than what was necessary before: real-time processing, contextual interfaces, automated analysis, and far more computational headroom than earlier generations of tools ever had. The goal wasn’t to add features. It was to rethink how color should work if it were reinvented today.

He built that vision knowing it would likely be rejected.

It wasn’t.

The Choice to Start Over

Adobe’s approval turned a thought experiment into a three-year development effort. What had started as a speculative exercise now had to become a real system, with real users, real constraints, and real consequences. The internal project became what Adobe would later call Color Mode—a name that reflects the philosophy behind it. No branding flourish, no attempt to position it as something exotic. It’s color. It’s a mode. That’s it.

What makes this effort unusual is not just that it was built from scratch, but that it was intentionally built outside the expectations of existing professional tools. Alexis has been explicit about this. “Color Mode was not designed for DaVinci Resolve users, and it was not intended to replicate node-based workflows,” said Van Hurkman. “In fact, I don’t know if anyone outside of Adobe would have let me build this, never mind giving me such a fantastic and extensive team to work with.”

This makes the purpose of why Color Mode is unique. Color Mode is not Premiere’s Lumetri with improvements. It is a different model entirely.

Designed for Editors

At the center of that model are a few non-negotiable ideas. The first is that color should be easy to learn. Not less powerful—just faster to grasp. Colorists can absolutely use Color Mode, but it is not designed primarily for them. It is designed for editors.

The primary user is someone who touches color intermittently: an editor moving between cutting, sound, graphics, and delivery; a creator who needs to get to a result quickly; or someone returning to the tool after weeks or months away. In that context, complexity is not a mark of sophistication—it is friction. The system is built so that an editor can get to a usable, good-looking result quickly.

The second idea is that workflow matters more than feature depth. Traditional tools often expose every possible control, but they distribute those controls across panels, modes, and layers of UI that slow people down. Color Mode takes the opposite approach. It concentrates the most important actions into a smaller surface area and reduces the number of steps required to get from intention to result. The question is not “what can the tool do?” but “how quickly can someone do what they need?”

The third idea is leverage. Every interaction should do more. Fewer clicks, fewer drags, fewer decisions. This leads to a system that relies heavily on contextual interfaces and combined controls—decisions that would be controversial in a traditional color tool but make sense if the goal is efficiency.

These principles also explain who the tool is not designed for. Dedicated colorists, especially those deeply invested in node-based workflows or curve manipulation, may find parts of this system unfamiliar or even limiting. That tradeoff is intentional. The system is optimized for the majority of use cases not the most specialized one.

That doesn’t mean Color Mode was built without powerful color tools or user feedback. In fact, over the course of development, the Premiere team built prototypes, ran user testing, and operated a private beta for nearly a year. One consistent pattern emerged: early resistance was common, but it often diminished with use. As people adapted to the workflow, many of the initial objections gave way to a different reaction—not that the tool was more powerful, but that it was faster and more approachable than expected and allowed for a more playful approach to color.

That shift highlights what Color Mode is really about. The changes in Color Mode are not cosmetic. They are not even primarily about adding capability. They are about removing constraints that were inherited from earlier eras of software and replacing them with a system designed for how people actually work today.

The Problem with Legacy Color Tools

Legacy color tools were built around assumptions that no longer hold. They were designed for specialists operating in controlled environments, often with dedicated hardware panels, calibrated monitors, and the expectation of deep, continuous use. The interfaces—curves, nodes, lift/gamma/gain—reflect that lineage. They assume the user understands color theory, remembers the tool between sessions, and is willing to navigate complexity in exchange for precision.

That model breaks down in a modern editing context. Most editors are not grading all day. They are switching between cutting, sound, graphics, and delivery. They return to color intermittently, often under time pressure and with inconsistent footage from multiple sources. In that environment, the cognitive overhead of traditional tools becomes friction rather than power.

At the same time, the underlying assumptions of those tools are tied to hardware-era constraints that no longer exist. Fixed panels require fixed mappings. Limited processing required simplified models. Even UI layouts were shaped by what could be rendered and updated in real time decades ago. Much of what persists today is inertia, not necessity.

This is why incremental improvements were insufficient. You can add features, improve performance, or refine math, but as long as the interaction model remains the same, the fundamental problem remains: the tools are optimized for a user and a workflow that are no longer dominant.

The limitation isn’t that the tools are outdated in capability. It’s that they are misaligned with how most people now work.

Adobe’s Decision to Start Over

Whether Adobe’s decision to start from scratch pays off will ultimately be decided in use—not in demos or philosophy, but in how quickly people can get to a result they want. The wager Adobe is making is clear: that most users will trade familiar controls for a system that reduces friction, even if it requires relearning how color works.

That is a meaningful shift. It redefines what “good” color tooling looks like—from maximum control to maximum momentum. It also introduces new failure modes: if the abstractions hold, the workflow accelerates; if they break, users have fewer visible levers to recover.

Everything that follows—the controls, the workflows, the tradeoffs—flows from that bet.

Premiere Color Mode Article Series

This article is article number one in a series of articles on Color Mode. In the next article, we’ll compare Color Mode directly to Lumetri: what’s actually different, what problems each system is solving, and why those differences matter in real-world editing.

For more information on Color Mode in Premiere (beta), visit Adobe’s website for more information and download the beta through the Creative Cloud application.