Adobe SpeedGrade CC Is Dead; Long Live Lumetri Color
By Jim Bask
Adobe SpeedGrade CC reached end-of-life this week, as Adobe ceased all development on the powerful standalone color-grading application.
The move doesn’t actually come as a surprise. Since Adobe acquired SpeedGrade in 2011, customers had often complained that the software was difficult for non-colorists to use, but Adobe never seemed particularly dedicated to updating or streamlining SpeedGrade itself. Instead, it worked on integrating some of SpeedGrade’s color science in Premiere Pro’s editor-friendly Lumetri color panel. Support for round-tripping with SpeedGrade was removed from Premiere Pro last summer, and now the Lumetri panel is where Creative Cloud users are now expected to do all of their color work.
In a blog post at Adobe, Senior Product Manager for Video Editing Patrick Palmer (at one time the COO of SpeedGrade’s original developer, Iridas) said the use of Lumetri tools by Premiere Pro users has increased dramatically and “the vast majority of SpeedGrade users” have migrated to the Lumetri Color panel, leading Adobe to abandon SpeedGrade and focus instead on the Lumetri panel. “There’s still a lot we plan to do to increase productivity for everyone working with color and light,” Palmer wrote, “and we’re also laser focused on keeping the promise of the Lumetri design approach true for all the emerging standards adding HDR and WCG to the pipeline.”