Steal any look — honestly
Color Match
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.
Same frame, two references
One neutral capture, two looks — each matched from a different reference, in perceptual Oklab.
What it is
You give Color Match two things: your image, and a reference — a film still, a frame from your own set, or one of the built-in Starter Looks. It studies how color is distributed in the reference and reshapes yours to match.
Then it bakes that match into a .cube LUT or a Lightroom .xmp preset — so the look is portable and reads identically in every app you open it in.
The controls
Starter Looks
Grab a vetted reference — Golden Haze, Astral Blue, Teal & Blush — in a single click.
Add your own reference
Drop in any frame; the match is computed from its colors, not a canned filter.
Classic / Precise
Two engines. Classic matches the reference's average color and spread; Precise matches its full color distribution — shape and lean included — for a truer transfer.
Strength
How far to push toward the reference (0–100%). 100% clones the palette; 70–80% is usually the sweet spot.
Contrast
How much of the reference's brightness spread to adopt. 0 keeps your own exposure.
Protect skin
Eases the match off skin tones so faces stay believable.
Per-zone strength
Balance the match across Shadows, Mids, and Highlights independently.
Color Rotation
Re-assign the matched colors across tones — a creative kaleidoscope (0° = native).
What to do with it
Where Color Match earns its place in a real grade.
Unify a set
Match every frame to one hero shot so a multi-cam or run-and-gun shoot reads like a single story.
Borrow a look you admire
A film still, a photographer's frame, a poster — drop it in as the reference and reverse-engineer the palette.
Tame mixed lighting
Pull window-plus-tungsten chaos toward one clean reference instead of fighting it channel by channel.
Start a grade fast
Lift a flat log or raw capture most of the way to a finished look in one move, then refine with Curves and Tonal HSL.
Build a reusable LUT
Nail the match once, export the .cube, and reuse it across an entire project.
Field tips
- Turn Strength down for a “match, don't clone” feel — the reference informs your shot instead of replacing it.
- Reach for Protect skin on any portrait before you touch anything else.
- Use per-zone strength when a reference's shadows are doing the heavy lifting and you don't want it touching your highlights.
The science
The part nobody else explains
Why perceptual color (Oklab)
Match in raw RGB and equal numeric moves don't look equal to your eye — you get lurching hue shifts and uneven saturation. Color Engine matches in Oklab, a space engineered so equal moves are roughly equal perceived change. So “make it look like the reference” means exactly that, instead of “make the numbers equal.”
A grade is a distribution, reshaped
Picture every pixel as a dot in color space — your image is one cloud of dots, the reference another. A match moves and reshapes your cloud to sit where the reference's sits. Classic matches the cloud's center (mean color) and spread (how saturated the range is) — the classic statistical color-transfer approach, fast and robust. Precise matches the cloud's full shape — its covariance, the orientation and lean of the color, like a teal-shadow to warm-highlight axis — so directional, cinematic looks transfer faithfully instead of averaging into a flat tint.
Zone-aware, because a look isn't one color
Real looks put different color in the shadows than the highlights. Color Engine splits luminance into three zones and matches each, so teal-and-orange lands as teal-and-orange — not mud.
Contrast and skin, handled
Brightness is part of a look, so Contrast lets you dial how much of the reference's tonal spread you adopt. And because skin lives in a narrow, unforgiving band, Protect skin holds it back from the transfer so people don't go green or orange.
Deterministic by design
It's math on distributions, so the result bakes exactly into a LUT or .xmp. What you see in the studio is what ships — in DaVinci, Premiere, Lightroom, anywhere.
Frequently asked
Does it work on raw or log footage?
Yes — it's a great fast base grade. Match a flat capture toward a finished reference, then fine-tune from there.
Will it copy the reference's exposure too?
Only as much as you let it. The Contrast control sets how much of the reference's brightness spread you adopt; at 0 it keeps your own exposure and matches color only.
Will it wreck skin tones?
Turn on Protect skin. Skin sits in a narrow, sensitive band, and Protect skin eases the match off it so faces stay natural.
Can I get this into Lightroom automatically?
Export a .xmp preset today and import it into Lightroom. A dedicated Lightroom plugin that auto-imports your Color Engine profiles is on the way.
Classic or Precise — which should I use?
Start with Precise for cinematic, directional looks where the reference's color lean matters. Drop to Classic when you want a faster, gentler average-color match.
Related features
Try Color Match on your own shot
Build a look, match it across a set, and export a LUT or preset in minutes — free for 14 days, no installs.