Color Grading Tool
An online color grader for photos: shape shadows, midtones and highlights with color wheels, fix the white balance, apply a cinematic look, in your browser, nothing uploaded.
or browse filesdrop an image here or paste
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An online color grader for photos: shape shadows, midtones and highlights with color wheels, fix the white balance, apply a cinematic look, in your browser, nothing uploaded.
or browse filesdrop an image here or paste
Color grading is the step after the picture is correct: it gives a photo a look. Teal shadows under orange skin, the warm fade of old film, the cold blue of a night scene - none of that is a filter pasted on top, it is a colour pushed into one tonal zone and another colour into a different one. This is a color grading website built around exactly that: three color wheels, one each for the shadows, midtones and highlights, on top of the tone and white balance controls a photo needs to be correct in the first place.
Drop a photo on the page and start with a preset if you want a cinematic look in one click, or build your own. The preview follows every slider as you drag it, and holding the compare button shows the untouched original so you can judge how far you have gone. Nothing is uploaded: the grading runs in your browser, on the web page itself, and the download is the full-resolution file.
Everything on the panel is a slider, and every slider has a Reset link, so nothing you try is a commitment. The Reset all link at the top clears the whole grade.
Color correction makes a photo look the way the scene looked: neutral whites, natural skin, no green cast from fluorescent tubes or orange cast from a tungsten bulb. Color grading makes it look the way you want it to look. Most editors do both in one pass and most searches mix the two words up, so this tool carries both halves - the plain color adjustment a digital photo needs to look right, and the grade that gives it a style.
The correction half is the Auto button and the Temperature and Tint sliders. Auto color correction measures the average colour of the picture in linear light, ignoring pixels that are clipped or near black, and sets the temperature and tint that would make that average neutral - the grey-world method every camera uses for its own auto white balance. It sets the sliders rather than applying a hidden fix, so you can see what it decided and pull it back if the cast was the point, as it usually is in a sunset. For tone, the exposure tool works in camera stops with a clipping overlay, and the contrast editor changes the spread between light and dark.
The three wheels are what makes this a color grader and not a colour filter. Each one pushes a colour into a single tonal range. The swatch sets the hue and how saturated the push is - a pale blue-grey nudges, a deep teal shoves - and the slider beside it sets how much of that colour reaches the zone. The colour is added as a direction rather than a paint layer, so a grey swatch does nothing and a coloured one shifts the hue of that zone without brightening or darkening it. The zones overlap smoothly around the midtones, so there is no visible line where the shadows stop and the midtones start.
Two common grades, as starting points. Teal and orange: shadows toward teal at 40-50, highlights toward orange at 35-45, a few points of saturation. Skin sits in the highlights and midtones, so it warms, while everything dark goes cool, and the two complementary colours make each other stronger. Cold cinematic: shadows toward a deep blue, highlights toward a pale cream, shadows tone pulled down a little for contrast. The presets on the panel are built from these same wheels, so choosing one and then looking at where the sliders landed is a short course in how a look is made.
The three tone sliders brighten or darken one zone at a time, measured in camera stops: +100 is one stop up in that zone, -100 one stop down. Highlights and midtones are pure gains, so a stop of highlights makes bright areas brighter and leaves black exactly black. The shadows slider is half gain and half lift, which is what a lift wheel does in a grading suite - raising it opens up the blacks into a soft matte fade, lowering it crushes them for a harder, contrastier image. Combined with the wheels, that is how the faded-film presets work: shadows lifted and tinted warm, highlights pulled down and tinted cream.
Temperature moves the picture between blue and orange, tint between green and magenta - the same two axes as the white balance controls in Lightroom, Camera Raw or a phone's photo editor. At the ends of the range temperature swings red against blue by more than half a stop each way, enough to take a photo shot under tungsten light back to daylight. Both are applied as gains on light, not as an offset added to the pixel values, which is the difference between a warm photo and a photo with an orange smear on it: a gain leaves black black and white white, an offset turns the blacks brown. A cast that runs one way through the whole image is what these fix; if a single colour is wrong on its own, the color changer swaps that one colour and leaves the rest alone.
Saturation scales the colour of every pixel equally around its own brightness; at -100 the picture is black and white, which is also how the black and white preset is made. Vibrance is the careful version: it boosts colours that are still muted and leaves the ones that are already strong alone, so pushing it up on a portrait deepens a sky and a jacket without turning the face orange. For a dedicated tool, the hue shifter rotates every colour around the wheel, and the image tinter casts the whole photo toward one colour instead of grading it by zone.
The preview and the download run the same maths, so what you see is what you save, at the full resolution of the file you opened. With every slider at zero the image is passed through untouched, byte for byte, and transparency is kept, so a PNG with a transparent background stays transparent. Very large photos are previewed at a reduced size so the sliders stay responsive, and rendered at full size when you download.
All of it happens on your device: the image is never sent to a server, there is no account, no queue and no watermark, and the page keeps working offline once it has loaded. It is a photo tool - for video color grading you would export a frame, grade it here to find the look, and carry the settings across.
Open the photo here, correct the white balance with Auto or the temperature and tint sliders, then pick colours on the shadows and highlights wheels and set how strongly each is pushed in. Adjust saturation or vibrance to taste and download the result as PNG, JPG or WebP at full resolution. Everything runs in the browser, nothing is uploaded, and there is no signup or watermark.
Correction makes the photo accurate: neutral whites, natural skin, no colour cast. Grading makes it expressive: a colour pushed into the shadows, another into the highlights, a fade or a crush in the blacks. Do correction first - Auto, temperature, tint, tone - and grade on top of it, because a grade built over a colour cast falls apart the moment the cast is fixed.
The most common cinematic look: cool teal in the shadows and warm orange in the highlights. Skin tones live in the warm end, backgrounds and shadows go cool, and because teal and orange are opposite on the colour wheel each makes the other look stronger. The Teal & orange preset sets it up; the two wheels then let you tune how far each colour goes.
Same idea, simpler control. Each wheel here is a colour swatch plus a strength slider, and it pushes that colour into its own tonal range - shadows, midtones or highlights - without changing the brightness of that range. The tone sliders play the role of the lift, gamma and gain brightness, in camera stops. There are no curves or secondaries; for a fast, editable look on a photo it is the same workflow.
Not directly - it grades still images. The practical route is to export a representative frame from the video, grade it here to find the look, and then apply the same temperature, tint, tone and wheel settings in your video editor. The wheels map one to one onto any three-way color corrector.
Yes - colour grading is the British spelling of the same thing, and the tool is the same either way.
No. The image is decoded, graded and encoded in your browser, at preview and at full download resolution alike. Nothing is sent anywhere, and the tool keeps working with the network disconnected once the page is open.