Hi I would like to know if there is a way to get EXRs from Foundry Nuke to Adobe Premiere 2026 with a aces workflow. Best way I found out is to export exr’s from Nuke as acescct, but still I get small differences in look in Premiere. If I screen multiple exr’s as “3d lightgroup” passes on top each other the image get brighter and brighter on blacks. If I composite 8 bit images on top of my aces composition the 8bit images get slightly darker than 8 bit images in Nuke (Output - sRGB). Are there any guides or workflows for this?
Hey @scorpes ,
Premiere Pro does not support ACES natively nor does it offer OCIO. You would need to use LUTs or external OCIO plugin. How are you setting up your color management in Premiere?
If you export lights as separate beauty passes they need to be linear light and layered with Add not Screen otherwise the light output never rises above 1.0. Premiere also automatically applies a gamma conversion for EXRs which you’d have to turn off in the source settings to keep them linear. In your sequence settings max bit depth and max render quality should also be turned on to maintain 32bit float image processing.
It’s not practical to store ACEScct in an EXR as it’s floating point format does not lend itself well for log encodings. If you want to have the media source in log rather than linear data in Premiere, 16bit png/tiff or 10/12bit dpx/prores 4444 are viable options I’d say.
Premiere 2026 does support Acescct.
It does not have “Add” as layer operation, that’s why I use screen.
Thanks for the screenshots. The ACEScct working color space is exactly just that - a color space. It isn’t the full ACES color management framework. Premiere has their own transformations designed to go from scene to display.
Depending on what your intent or the restrictions and goals for the project whether you can accept dealing with an image appearance difference or not but I can also say that currently the way Premiere’s “wide gamut tone mapped” management works is unusable for a couple reasons but namely that there is no inverse transform so adding sRGB graphics like logos will not retain their appearance.
I would suggest to grab the free fnord OpenColorIO plugin. Then export your EXRs to ACES2065-1 which is linear. In premiere disable the automatic linear conversion on the .exr files. Add on an Adjustment Layer or on the clips themselves an OpenColorIO effect to convert ACES2065-1 directly to Rec.709 by clicking the Display button or to ACEScct if you wish to colorgrade first followed by a second OCIO effect that uses the Display mode and convert ACEScct to Rec.709 from there. You can also do some effects while still in linear but it depends on how they’re designed if they will work accurately. Glows for example need to support 32bit and be able to have their blendmode set to Add.
In Premiere’s color management settings you need to set it to Direct Rec.709 SDR. You can leave your .exrs tagged as being Rec.709 so Premier does not apply any additional conversion. This way for all other media Premiere can remain color managed.
As to the light blending, Linear Dodge (Add) is the same thing so you can use that.
Thanks for the reply! This works much better! Also I did not know that linear Dodge is the same as Add. But in my example I get 99% the same result with Screen and your workflow, if I use linear Dodge, for some reason my result is a little bit more overexposed and saturated in comparison with Nuke. See picture:
hmm that looks quite ‘toasty’, it could be that the blendmodes are applied post clip effects so it happens in display space in this case rather than linear. To get around that you’d need to either stack them in a Nested sequence and then apply the OCIO effects on the nest clip. Or leave them as is but add the OCIO effects on an Adjustment Layer above the clips instead of on themselves.
Yes you are right, with adjustment layer I get the same result with Linear Dodge. THANKS! Hope premiere will have a better Aces color management system in the future, to make things easier.
Glad you got it solved.
I would say that for visibility and ease of use it would be best to not use Nested Sequences. If you use adjustment layers and name them descriptively you can easily see what happens when and can disable parts of the chain if needed while working.
I’d also add that while it is possible to work like this, consider what your actual plan would be. Premiere is really slow when it comes to rendering with OCIO plugin. If you only edit/finish and barely need to do any compositing changes, it would be much more efficient to make the final look in Nuke or even After Effects and hand off display rendered Rec.709 ProRes clips for use in Premiere.
Does the GPU acceleration work for OCIO plugin? Well the plan is to be able to output in proper 10bit to compatible 10bit codecs from Premiere and we need to be able to do final color grading with premiere. And to have a workflow that I can use Aces in Nuke and have the same output in Premiere. Right now we export EXR sRGB which sucks.
No, otherwise the timeline render bar should’ve been yellow rather than red in your screenshot.
Color grading with Premiere’s current tools isn’t ideal but may be enough depending on what you need. The bigger issue is performance which imo should be real-time or really close to if. If your current setup is fast enough for you that’s great. If not I would suggest to try an alternative route exporting from Nuke ProRes 4444 ACEScct files and create a LUT that converts ACEScct to sRGB. LUTs are much faster to process in Premiere and so is ProRes.
You cannot do the light-passes stacking approach in a log state though so you’d need to make sure you’re mostly happy with the light ratios from Nuke’s comp since there is also no native way to convert ACEScct to linear in Premiere.
Yes thanks, found out that I can use the same approach with generated LUTs and bypass the slow OCIO plugin