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Auto Color grades your timeline like a colorist: it looks at an actual frame from every source clip, measures it, corrects the exposure and white balance, sculpts the contrast, and applies a look on top — while keeping shots from the same scene consistent with each other so your cuts don’t jump. Works in Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve.

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Quick Start

1

Convert your Log footage first

Shooting Log? Apply your Log → Rec.709 conversion (LUT or color-space transform) before running. Auto Color grades on top of your base image.
2

Open the tool

Open the Tools Menu and select Auto Color.
3

Describe the look you want

Type your instruction in the prompt box — e.g. “warm cinematic look, match all the clips”. Optional, but this is where the creative direction lives.
4

Set a time range (optional)

Leave Time Start and Time End empty to grade the whole timeline.
5

Run

Click Start Auto Color.
Log / flat footage without a conversion will not grade well. Auto Color reads the image it is given: if you hand it a washed-out Log frame, it corrects a washed-out Log frame. Put your LUT or color-space transform on first.

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What it actually does

1. Shot matching

Every source is fingerprinted, then shots that belong to the same scene, lighting setup or camera are grouped so they share one consistent look. Unrelated scenes are deliberately not matched — a daylight exterior and a tungsten interior stay separate.

2. Per-shot grade

Each source is then graded individually: correction first (exposure, white balance, contrast), creative look second — following its group’s shared direction when it has one.

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What gets adjusted

The grade is a full Basic Correction pass, not a two-slider nudge:
One frame per source is analysed, not one per clip. If the same source appears eight times in your edit, it’s analysed once and the grade is applied to all eight instances — consistently, and for the cost of one.

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How it lands on your timeline

In Premiere, hide or delete the adjustment-layer track to see the before/after instantly — and to throw the whole grade away in one move.

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Settings

Unlike Auto Mix, the time range here scopes both the analysis and the grade — only the clips in the window are looked at. Grading a section on its own means it won’t be matched against shots outside the window, so expect it to sit slightly differently from the rest.

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Writing a Good Prompt

Describe the image you want to see. Reference a mood, a film, a palette — not slider values.

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What works

  • A look: “Warm cinematic look, teal shadows, film-like contrast.” / “Clean and neutral, corporate.” / “Cold, desaturated, moody.”
  • A reference: “Nordic thriller palette.” / “Sunny golden-hour vlog feel.” / “Documentary — natural, no stylisation.”
  • Matching intent: “Make everything match, it’s all one interview.” / “Keep each location distinct, don’t match across scenes.”
  • A known problem: “My footage is too warm under this lighting, neutralise it.” / “The interior shots are underexposed.”
  • Restraint: “Correction only, no creative look.” / “Subtle — don’t push the saturation.”
  • Skin priority: “Talking head — skin tones are the priority, everything else is secondary.”

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What doesn’t work

  • Slider values. “Set exposure to +0.4” — say the image is dark instead.
  • Per-clip instructions. “Make the third shot cooler” — grade the timeline, then adjust that clip by hand. It’s already an editable Lumetri instance.
  • Timecodes in the prompt. Use the Time Start / Time End fields.
  • Selective / secondary corrections. No masks, no power windows, no “only change the sky” or “isolate the red jacket”. This is a primary grade.
  • Split-toning by name. “Teal shadows, orange highlights” is understood as a direction, but true wheel-based split-toning isn’t part of what gets applied — expect the spirit, not the exact technique.
  • Fixing the shot. Clipped highlights that hold no data, heavy noise, or a badly out-of-focus frame can’t be recovered by a grade.
  • A LUT by name. “Apply Kodak 2383” won’t load a LUT. Describe the look and it will be approximated with the correction controls.
“[The look you want]. [Matching intent]. [Any known problem]. [How far to push it].”
Example:
“Warm, filmic look with deep blacks — golden-hour feel. All the interview shots are the same setup, match them. The B-roll outside is a bit cold, neutralise it. Keep it subtle, skin must stay natural.”
If the first pass overshoots, add one restraint sentence (“much more subtle, correction-led”) and re-run, rather than rewriting the whole brief.

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After the run

The grade is standard, editable color correction — nothing is baked in. You can retune any shot, copy a grade from one clip to another, or delete it entirely.
Review on your cuts, not clip by clip. A grade that looks great in isolation but jumps at a cut is the real failure mode — and it usually means two shots that should have been matched weren’t. Say so in the prompt and re-run.

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Common Pitfalls

  • Log footage with no conversion applied → the most common cause of a disappointing result. Convert first.
  • An already-graded timeline → Auto Color adds its own correction on top of yours. Remove your existing grade first, or the two stack.
  • Nested sequences → the clips inside can’t be analysed as separate sources. Flatten first.
  • Expecting scene-to-scene uniformity → grouping is deliberately conservative. Different lighting setups stay different unless you explicitly ask to match everything.
  • A very large timeline costs proportionally more: the price scales with the number of unique sources, not the number of clips or the duration.
  • Frames that can’t be exported (footage offline, media on a blocked or synced folder) are skipped — check your media is online before running.
Recommended workflow: convert Log → one full pass with a short look-and-matching prompt → review at the cuts → re-run with a restraint or matching correction if needed → hand-tune the two or three shots that still stand out.