Color Grade Video Online

Every look in the gallery was designed for this site and is built from the same controls you can reach in Pro tools: white balance, curves, colour wheels, HSL, split toning and, for some, grain, halation or a vignette. None of them is a copied camera LUT or a film brand in disguise. Because each one is a set of numbers rather than a baked file, the thumbnails are drawn live on a frame of your own clip, and Intensity can fade any look from nothing to full strength.

Open All looks (or press L) and browse by category. Natural holds clean, honest corrections for when you only want the footage to look right. Cinematic, Moody and Teal & orange lean towards the feature-film end, with deeper shadows and separated skin and background; the cinematic grading page and the teal and orange page explain how those palettes work. Film stocks imitate the response of colour negative and print film in general terms, and Vintage reaches back through home movies and early camcorders; see the film look and vintage filter pages for both.

Warm, Cool and Pastel shift the overall temperature and softness. Black & white and Sepia & duotone remove or replace colour altogether (there is a black and white guide for those), while Colour splash keeps a single hue and greys the rest, as described on the colour splash page. Matte, Bleach bypass and Cross-process borrow darkroom and lab tricks: lifted blacks, silver-heavy contrast and deliberately mismatched chemistry. The subject categories, Night, Nature, Underwater, Food, Wedding, Travel and Social, group looks that suit a kind of footage, such as the red-restoring Reef Red Restore for dives.

Search finds looks by mood or colour, the arrow keys try each one on your clip in turn, and F adds the focused look to Favourites. Looks you have used recently collect under Recent, and anything you save with Save as my look appears under My looks. Stuck for ideas? Surprise me picks one at random. Any look can also leave the site as a .cube file: the free LUTs page explains how.

Correction first, then the grade

Colourists split the job in two. Correction removes the camera’s mistakes: a blue cast from shade, a green tinge from cheap LED panels, two shots of the same scene that don’t agree. Grading comes afterwards and is a creative choice, the decision that a scene should feel cold, nostalgic or sunlit. Doing it in that order matters, because a look designed for neutral footage lands differently on a clip that already leans orange. On this site, Auto colour, Pick white and Match colours do the correcting, and the looks do the grading. The guide to what colour grading is goes further.

White balance is a multiplication in linear light

A colour cast happens because the light itself was coloured: tungsten bulbs are rich in red, open shade is rich in blue. Physically, that scales each of the red, green and blue components of the light by a different factor, so the honest fix is to scale them back. The catch is that video files don’t store light directly. Their values are gamma-encoded, compressed so that dark tones get more of the available codes. Multiply those encoded numbers and the shadows and highlights shift by different amounts, which leaves a cast in one end of the image while fixing the other. So Temperature and Tint here decode each pixel to linear light, apply per-channel gains there and encode the result again. When you click a white wall with Pick white, the tool solves for the gains that make that wall neutral.

A LUT is a three-dimensional grid

A look-up table answers one question: for this input colour, what output colour? A 3D LUT samples the whole colour cube at regular steps. A 33-point LUT stores 33 × 33 × 33, or 35,937, input colours, each with its own output; a 65-point LUT stores 274,625. Any colour that falls between grid points has to be interpolated from its neighbours. Trilinear interpolation blends the eight corners of the little cube around the colour. Tetrahedral interpolation splits that cube into six tetrahedra and blends only the four corners of the one the colour falls inside. It is cheaper and, more importantly, keeps greys on the neutral diagonal of the cube exactly grey, which is why colour suites prefer it.

This grader works the same way. Every colour operation in your grade, from the log conversion to the look, is evaluated once on a 33-point grid and then applied to each pixel with tetrahedral interpolation. That is why Export .cube can hand you a LUT that matches the preview. Effects that depend on neighbouring pixels, such as Grain, Vignette, Halation and Bloom, are applied afterwards and can’t live in a LUT.

Why log footage looks flat and grey

A camera sensor can capture far more stops of light than a standard video file is built to show. Log profiles such as S-Log3, V-Log or Apple Log store that range by giving each stop a similar share of the code values, instead of crowding the highlights. The file then looks low in contrast and desaturated on a normal screen, because it was never meant to be watched directly. Converting it means three steps: undo the log curve to get back to scene light, translate the camera’s wide gamut into Rec.709 primaries, and render the result for a display with a gentle roll-off in the brightest areas. The Footage menu does this from each maker’s published curves and primaries; the log to Rec.709 page lists the profiles and the honest caveats.

Skin tones and the vectorscope

The Vectorscope ignores where things are in the frame and plots every pixel by colour alone: the angle round the circle is hue, the distance from the centre is saturation. Human skin, across every complexion, clusters along a narrow band of hue between red and yellow, because the same blood and melanin colour it; complexions differ far more in lightness and saturation than in hue. The scope marks that band with a skin tone line. If the faces in your shot form a streak that leans towards green or magenta, the clip has a tint problem; if they sit on the line, the grade around them can go as stylised as you like and people will still look like people.