Photo Colour Grader — 8 LUT Presets & Adjustment Sliders

Apply eight professional colour grading presets to any photo — Cinematic, Vintage, Matte, Cool, Warm, Teal & Orange, Faded and Vivid. Furthermore, five individual adjustment sliders (brightness, contrast, saturation, shadows and highlights) let you refine each preset or build a custom look from scratch. Before/after split view and no server upload.

How to use the Photo Colour Grader

The eight colour presets explained

Each preset applies a combination of brightness, contrast, saturation, shadows, highlights and RGB channel shifts. Furthermore, different subjects benefit from different presets.

How colour grading works in the browser

Each preset combines Canvas CSS filters for brightness, contrast. Saturation with a pixel loop for RGB channel shifts, shadows lift and highlights control. Furthermore, the pixel-level operations allow colour grading effects that CSS filters alone cannot achieve.

Worked example: applying Teal & Orange to a landscape photo

A travel photographer wants the popular "Teal & Orange" blockbuster film look for a mountain landscape. Settings after preset:

What is colour grading?

Colour grading is the process of adjusting the colour, contrast and tone of an image or video to achieve a specific visual mood or aesthetic. Furthermore, it differs from colour correction — which fixes technical issues like white balance. Exposure — by applying creative style choices that go beyond accuracy. Professional film colour grading uses Look Up Tables (LUTs) — three-dimensional matrices. Map every input colour to a specific output colour. Moreover, browser-based grading using CSS filters. Pixel manipulation simulates the most recognisable LUT effects without requiring dedicated colour grading software.

The "Teal & Orange" look became the most recognisable colour grading style in cinema after its popularisation in blockbuster films of the 2000s. Furthermore, the technique pushes shadows toward teal (blue-green) and highlights toward orange — colours that are complementary on the colour wheel and create high contrast visual appeal. Human skin tones are naturally warm and shift toward orange under this grading, separating faces from cooler background tones. Moreover, the style became ubiquitous in travel and outdoor photography after social media popularised cinematic aesthetics in everyday photography.

Shadows lift and the matte look

Shadows lift raises the minimum brightness of dark pixels above true black. Furthermore, a lifted shadow value means the darkest areas of the image appear as dark grey rather than pure black — creating the characteristic "matte" or "faded" look associated with film stock photography and Instagram filter aesthetics. Moreover, combined with reduced contrast, shadows lift produces the low-contrast, soft-toned look of film stock that has been overexposed or printed on matte paper.

Why preset plus slider access matters

Preset-only tools produce the same result for every user — the tool makes one opinionated decision about how "Cinematic" should look. Furthermore, different photos benefit from different intensities of the same preset — a portrait needs a subtler cinematic grade than a landscape. Individual sliders after preset application allow calibrating the intensity without abandoning the overall direction. Moreover, combining a preset with manual slider refinement produces personal creative looks that feel different from the stock preset — giving individual photographers a distinct visual identity rather than the exact same filter as every other user of the tool.

Frequently asked questions

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