A grading tool that never sees your photos.
Halation is a free colour grading tool that runs entirely inside your browser. You drop in a photograph, choose a look, adjust it, and export at the original resolution. At no point does the image travel anywhere — there is no upload, no account, no queue, and no server that could keep a copy even if it wanted to.
Why no AI
The looks people describe as cinematic, warm or Japanese are not perceptual puzzles that need a model to solve. They are colour transforms: a tone curve, two tinted luminance masks, a saturation adjustment, and some optical artefacts layered on top. Lightroom presets and film simulation profiles have worked this way for two decades.
Doing it with arithmetic instead of a generative model buys three things worth having. It is deterministic — the same photo with the same settings gives you the same file, every time. It is instant, because a fragment shader grades a 45-megapixel image faster than an API call can finish its handshake. And it is private by construction rather than by promise.
What is actually running
A five-pass WebGL2 pipeline. Exposure and white balance are applied in linear light, where they are physically meaningful. Tone shaping, split toning and saturation happen in a gamma-encoded working space, where they behave the way a photographer expects. Highlights above a threshold are isolated, blurred across two separable gaussian passes, tinted, and added back as halation. Grain and vignette land last.
Every parameter a preset touches stays visible in the panel. Nothing is hidden behind a single slider, because the interesting part of grading is what happens when you disagree with the preset.
The name
Halation is the warm red-orange fringe that appears around a bright light source on film. Light passes through the emulsion, reflects off the back of the base, and re-exposes the layer from underneath. Modern stocks include an anti-halation backing specifically to suppress it. It is, in other words, a flaw — and it is one of the most reliable signals that a viewer reads as photographic.
Questions, bug reports, or a look you would like added: see the contact page.