Colour grading on your own device.
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. The editor does not upload your media or require an account. Your source file is not changed.
Photos and video use the same colour calculations. Video is processed frame by frame; the grade does not analyse the frames before or after. Glow effects do use nearby pixels within each frame. Video grain changes twelve times a second by default, with controls to freeze it or change it twenty-four times a second.
Why no AI
Halation uses editable colour transforms rather than a generative model. Tone shaping, colour mixing, split toning, saturation and texture change the pixels you supply. The editor does not replace objects or invent missing image details.
A look is a set of visible settings, so you can inspect and change how it is made. The preview runs on your device's graphics processor. Speed, supported dimensions and video export depend on the browser, available memory and graphics hardware. Media processing stays on your device; ordinary site visits and support email are described separately in the privacy policy.
What is actually running
A five-pass WebGL2 pipeline. Exposure and a channel-gain approximation of white balance are applied in linear light. Tone shaping, colour mixing, split toning and saturation happen in a gamma-encoded working space. 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
The name refers to the warm red-orange glow around bright light sources in film images. Halation's digital glow is an adjustable approximation. Its presets are aesthetic starting points, not measured reproductions of a film stock, camera or another editing program. The source photograph's lighting and colours affect the result, and no preset can recover clipped detail.
Try a complete edit
Open the Komorebi sample, lower Look intensity if the colours are too strong, then adjust Exposure for brightness. Drag across the preview or hold B to compare with the original. Open Film to change Grain or Halation, then choose Export full resolution to save a JPEG. Use the photo guide for input and output limits, or the video guide before editing a clip.
Responsibility and corrections
The Halation project maintains this editor, its presets and the Journal. Articles explain the calculations used here and link to relevant examples; descriptions of a visual effect should distinguish a creative approximation from a physical film process. Sample images are credited below, and examples state when they show a whole preset rather than one isolated control.
To report an error in the editor or an article, email [email protected] with the page address, the claim or steps involved, and a source or expected result. Corrections are checked against the current editor or the cited source, and a substantive content change is marked with an updated date on the affected page. The contact page explains what to include without sharing your original media.
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.