Adobe’s professional video editing software, Premiere Pro, has been the dominant choice for independent filmmakers in both their professional freelance and creative work (85 percent of 2026 Sundance filmmakers used Adobe’s Creative Cloud), but that dominance has started to slip in recent years, as increasingly more editors are trying out and converting to DaVinci Resolve.

Two key aspect of Resolve’s appeal: It’s not a monthly subscription model like Adobe’s Creative Cloud, and its robust color grading tools. Today, Adobe is taking aim at one of those perceived advantages with the launch of a new color grading tool it’s calling Color Mode. Color Mode is not a separate application, but a new, separate workspace inside Premiere, which subscribers can access now by installing the latest Premiere beta.

In the demo of the new product, Adobe’s Jason Druss, a 15-year video editor and a pro colorist, acknowledged that color correction is a highly specialized skill that editors and DYI filmmakers are increasingly expected to have.

“For more than a decade now, editors have been stuck in between two grading [options],” said Druss. “You either use the tools that come included with your NLE [non-linear editor], which have a very obvious low ceiling, and you fight through it, or you leave your edit behind entirely and spend thousands of hours studying very mathematical, scientific systems that were designed for full-time specialists and you fight through it.”

In demonstrating Color Mode, Druss highlighted how its robust controls are rooted in real color science, but also that these controls were intuitive, featuring bi-directional controls and layout that supplied instant visual feedback, while offerring a suite of cinematic looks (“Styles”) that could be customized.

Adobe’s overriding message was clear: Color Mode is sophisticated enough to be appreciated by professional colorists, while inviting less experienced, but curious colorists to learn “in a matter of days, not weeks.”

Adobe’s website described it this way: “Color Mode is designed to teach you as you work. Every control activates a heads-up display with scopes, numeric feedback, and real-time visual guidance. Styles give you professional cinematic looks in one click. If you can edit, you can color.”

It’s a layout Druss emphasized was built for video editors, and would not require Premiere users to learn a new workflow, while also bringing some efficiency to the process. The most evident example of this was the demonstration of “Operations,” which makes it easy to color grade an entire sequence, and/or apply the grade of one clip to other similar clips.

We’ll have to wait to see how editors react to Color Mode, once they get a chance to play with the new Premiere beta, to see how successful Adobe was in building a color correction tool that welcomes newbies and pros alike. But at first glance it is clear that the company has added some real functionality to Premiere.

You can watching a YouTube of a Color Mode demo below: