Learn the tools
One guide per panel — what it does, what to do with it, and the color science behind it. For readers who want to learn, not just click.
Your monitor lies — ambient light, eye fatigue, and a screen that drifted out of calibration all push you to grade by feel. Scopes show you the truth: an objective read of exposure, balance, and saturation, so your looks hold up on every screen but your own.
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Drop in a 3D LUT as your foundation — a film emulation, a creative look, a Color.io export — and grade on top of it. Base Look is the starting point everything else builds on, baked through to your final .cube or .xmp.
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Point Color Match at a reference you love and it moves your image's whole palette to meet it — zone by zone, in the color space your eyes actually use. Not a filter sitting on top of your shot: a real transfer of the reference's color, baked into a LUT or preset you can take anywhere.
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The primary corrector — three wheels that push color and level into your shadows, mids, and highlights. Lift, Gamma, Gain: the foundational balance every creative move builds on.
Read the deep-diveBefore any look, the foundation: make white read white. White Balance corrects the color of your light — the amber of tungsten, the blue of shade, the green of fluorescents — with two simple axes, so everything you grade on top sits on honest color.
Read the deep-diveBefore color, brightness. Exposure sets where your image sits on the tonal scale — lifting a murky underexposure, pulling a blown sky back from the edge — so every grade after it has room to breathe.
Read the deep-diveExposure sets how bright; Tone sets the shape. Contrast, your black and white points, where the image pivots — Tone is where a flat capture gets its punch, or a harsh one gets tamed.
Read the deep-diveColor, dialed up or down — but smarter than a single slider. Saturation sets how vivid your image reads, with a vibrance-style option that protects skin and the already-saturated from tipping into neon.
Read the deep-diveCurves are where contrast and color get surgical. Bend a line and you remap every tone exactly where you want it — lift the shadows, roll off the highlights, push warmth into the mids — on the master or one channel at a time.
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The creative color layer: tint your shadows, midtones, highlights, and the whole frame independently. Drag a wheel for hue and strength, set each zone's luminance, then blend them into a signature look — teal shadows, warm highlights, the works.
Read the deep-diveSometimes you don't want to move the whole image — just the skies, or the skin, or the foliage. Tonal HSL splits color into bands and lets you bend the Hue, Saturation, and Luminance of each one independently, no masks required.
Read the deep-divePoint at a color and pull it out of the image — a precise key by hue, saturation, and luminance — so your next move touches only the sky, the shirt, the skin, and nothing else. The qualifier is how a grade gets surgical.
Read the deep-diveEvery panel in the studio gets the same treatment.