Notes on colour.
Each note takes one idea from the grading pipeline and works through it properly — what it does, why it reads the way it does, and the numbers behind it.
Start with a photo →Grade your first clip →
Anatomy of a look: Nocturne
Cool ambient light, warm practicals and dense shadows—the exact settings behind Halation's night-exterior preset.
Black and white is a channel decision
Removing colour is only the start. RGB weights decide how red, green and blue become tonal contrast.
Linear light is for physics, gamma is for taste
Exposure and white balance need light-proportional values. Contrast and colour need a space that behaves the way the finished image looks.
The vignette nobody notices is the one that works
A useful vignette redirects attention without drawing a visible ring. The shader curve and real preset values explain how.
Vibrance vs saturation: one has a brake
Saturation moves every colour equally. Vibrance gives muted colours more room and vivid colours less, which keeps skin safer.
Film grain belongs to the frame, not the pixel
Why grain should scale with the photograph rather than its output pixels, and what a small preview cannot honestly show.
Diffusion: highlight glow without blurring the whole image
See how a thresholded glow is blended over a sharp base, how it shares controls with halation, and where the optical analogy stops.
Why teal and orange refuses to die
Complementary colour theory, skin tones, and the one thing every colourist knows about the orange axis.
Reading a Japanese film look, numerically
High key exposure, compressed contrast, green-leaning shade — the Komorebi preset taken apart parameter by parameter.
Halation, physically
What happens between the emulsion and the film base, and how to fake it convincingly in a fragment shader.
Lifted blacks: film density and the Fade control
See how Fade lifts display blacks, how that differs from film density, and when a softer finish becomes muddy.