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 or a video clip, choose a look, adjust it, and export — a still at the loaded resolution, or a video with audio retained when supported by the output format. Audio may be re-encoded. At no point does the file travel anywhere — there is no upload, no account, no queue, and no server that could keep a copy even if it wanted to.
Video needed no second set of formulas. Every step of the grade reads one pixel and writes one pixel, with no reference to the frame before or after, so the same shader that grades a photograph grades a clip frame by frame. The only thing that had to be added was time: grain now redraws itself twelve times a second instead of sitting still, because a fixed grain pattern on moving footage reads as dirt on the lens rather than as film.
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.
Sample photographs
Each look has its own photograph, selected to show its colours and texture. The sixteen photographs below are used under the Unsplash License. We resized them and created every graded example with Halation at 100% intensity.
- Cinematic — Streetlights at dusk by Leyla Acar.
- Golden — Golden light over English fields by George Hiles.
- Ember — Mountains beneath a pink sunset by Nathan Anderson.
- Komorebi — Sunlight through a woodland path by Paul Longhurst.
- Tide — Clear turquoise water along a rocky coast by Maharram Hasanli.
- Nocturne — A city street at blue hour by Mariia Filonenko.
- Bloom — Apricot blossoms in soft sunlight by Pascal Debrunner.
- Silver — Light and shadow on concrete stairs by Angela Matijczak.
- Cyberpunk — Neon signs reflected in a wet street by masahiro miyagi.
- Suzume — A rural railway under a blue sky by Andy Arbeit.
- Summer — Palm trees above a bright beach by Lukas Souza.
- Neon Noir — An alley lit by blue and orange lights by mos design.
- Chainsaw Man — Red and green machinery in an old factory by Peter Herrmann.
- Your Name — Sunset clouds over Tokyo by Shigeki Wakabayashi.
- Top Gun — A fighter jet cockpit in evening light by Mihai Neagu.
- 80s — A vintage car on a Paris street by JOHN TOWNER.
The earlier Lake Toya photograph by Kentaro Ohno and Vancouver harbour photograph by Daderot remain available in older examples and links under CC0 1.0.
The sharing cover uses Shigeki Wakabayashi’s Tokyo photograph with the Your Name look and a Halation wordmark.
We resized the source photographs for the sample editor and made every graded example with Halation's own presets. “Original” means before Halation grading, not an unprocessed camera RAW file. Examples show a whole preset unless the caption says otherwise. Grain can appear different at small preview sizes; judge fine texture in the exported file.
Questions, bug reports, or a look you would like added: see the contact page.