Your tone is the asset. Brightness is the frame around it. Load a frame, and this holds your skin at its natural richness while the highlights carry the light — then hands you a LUT to drop straight into Lumetri.
Deep skin looks best rendered more colorful — not lighter.
Color-preference research (Sanger et al.; CIC preferred-reproduction studies) finds skin's preferred hue is near-identical across ethnicities, while preferred chroma is highest for dark skin — measured preferred lightness around L*≈40 for African-skin imagery vs ≈67 for Caucasian. The cinematography canon agrees: Dickerson, Moonlight, Insecure shape deep skin with specular sheen and rich shadows, warmth in the mids. This suite is built on exactly that.
Gold jewelry flatters = golden · skin flushes warm = red · neither dominates = neutral. Judge this in person under good light, not off a screen. Golden is the safe default for deep skin.
Premiere's Program monitor shows Rec.709 at gamma 2.4. Browsers and most image viewers show your exported PNG at a lighter gamma (~1.96 on macOS, 2.2 on Windows) — so the frame looks a touch brighter and flatter here than in Premiere. Your footage is fine; it's a display-gamma difference, not a grading error.
Two ways to make this preview match Premiere exactly:
1 — Best: match at the source. In Premiere, set Lumetri Color → Settings → Project → Viewer Gamma → QuickTime (needs Sequence Color Setup on Direct Rec.709 SDR). Now Premiere's viewer and your exported frame agree, and this preview matches both.
2 — Or match here: set the viewer below to how you'll judge the final. Pick the display your audience uses — that's what "correct" should mean.
This only changes the preview so you can trust your eyes — it is not baked into the LUT, because the gamma shift is a viewer/OS setting, not part of your grade. Baking it in would double-correct on a properly configured system.
Fastest: download → Lumetri → Creative → Look → Browse → pick the file. Stack it after the Step-i conversion LUT (Basic Correction → Input LUT). The skin-hue alignment, skin darkening/vividness, shadow richness, sheen and warmth all live in the LUT — this replaces Hue-vs-Hue, Hue-vs-Sat and Hue-vs-Luma curve work entirely.
What "perfect" means here, honestly: one frame, not the whole clip; your monitor's calibration is invisible to this tool; auto white-balance assumes a roughly neutral scene, so a sunset or a colored wall can fool it. If the preview looked off versus Premiere, that's the gamma-shift note up top — set Viewer Gamma to QuickTime in Premiere and everything agrees. The LUT reproduces the grade itself exactly (gamma compensation stays in the preview only, never baked in). ⌘/Ctrl+Z undoes any move; Shift+Z redoes. This gets you most of the way in seconds — your eye, on a decent screen, does the last stretch.