Color Grading Palette

Knowledge Base

How to Use the Color Grading Palette

The Color Grading Palette tool helps you build cohesive color grades for video production. Input reference colors or adjust hue, saturation, and luminance to create complementary palettes that guide your color grading workflow. Export your palette and reference it while editing.

Color Theory for Video

Professional color grades use complementary (opposite on the color wheel) and analogous (adjacent colors) schemes. Skin tones typically sit in the orange-yellow range, shadows in the blue range. Balancing warm and cool tones creates visual interest without clashing.

Building a Grade

• Shadows: Cool (blue/cyan) shadows make footage look cinematic and push darkness to the background.
• Midtones: Where most of your color story happens. Often warm or neutral to support skin tones.
• Highlights: Often slightly warm (yellow/amber) or cool depending on mood. Never pure white.

Why Palettes Matter

Consistent color grading across all shots in a scene, or across an entire project, tells a visual story. Warm, golden grades feel optimistic. Cool, desaturated grades feel noir or melancholic. Random color shifts feel like mistakes.

FAQ

Q: Should I grade in Rec.709 or Log?
A: If your camera shot in Log, grade there first for maximum latitude. Then convert to Rec.709 for delivery.

Q: How do I ensure my grades translate to all screens?
A: Grade on a calibrated monitor. Reference on phone and laptop too. Avoid extreme saturation that crushes on consumer displays.

Using an extracted palette

Extraction finds the colours occupying the most pixels, which is not the same as the colours doing the most work. A shot dominated by a grey wall returns grey, even though the memorable thing about the frame might be a small red sign. Read the palette as a description of what fills the frame, then decide separately which colours carry the meaning.

A palette pulled from a reference still is specific to that lighting. The same set on an overcast afternoon returns different values, so treating extracted hex codes as a target to hit exactly leads to fighting your own footage. Use them to identify the relationship between colours, such as warm subject against cool background, and reproduce the relationship rather than the numbers.

Look at the proportions as much as the colours. Most images people describe as well graded use one dominant colour across a large area, one supporting colour, and a small accent covering very little of the frame. Reversing those proportions with the same three colours produces something that feels wrong despite matching the palette exactly.

Check any palette you plan to use for interface or graphics against contrast requirements before committing. Two colours can sit beautifully together in a photograph and still fail as text on a background, because a photograph carries detail and edges that text does not.

Vocabulary

Hex code. A six character code describing a colour as amounts of red, green and blue, written after a hash symbol. Understood by nearly every design and editing application, which makes it the usual way to hand a colour between tools.

Dominant colour. The colour occupying the largest share of an image. Useful for describing an overall look, and not necessarily the colour a viewer notices, since a small bright area can draw attention over a large muted one.

Complementary colours. Colours sitting opposite each other on the colour wheel, such as orange and blue. Placing them together produces strong separation, which is why the pairing recurs so often in film where skin has to stand out from a background.

Accent colour. A colour used across a small part of a frame to draw attention. Works because of its scarcity, so increasing the area it covers reduces its effect rather than strengthening it.