Color Grading

Upload a photo and see how temperature, tint, saturation and hue affect your specific colors.

Color grading is adjusting the colors in your photo so the mood is right. Upload a photo, pull out its dominant colors and see straight away how temperature, tint, saturation and hue affect your palette.

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You load your photo into Lightroom, but you're not sure which direction to take the colors. Warmer can tighten a photo or flatten it. More saturation works completely differently on a frame full of orange than on one that's mostly blue.

Upload your photo and the tool picks out the five most characteristic colors. For each color you see what temperature, tint, hue, saturation and lightness do. Click a variant and the photo updates live. Press the photo to see the original.

Color Grading: how it works

Upload a photo and the tool immediately extracts the dominant colors from your image. Then adjust temperature, tint, saturation and hue angle and watch what happens to your color palette in real time. Useful when you want to understand a color profile before recreating it in Lightroom or Capture One.

What the sliders actually control

Temperature shifts your colors from cool blue to warm orange, expressed in Kelvin. Tint corrects the green-magenta axis, which you often need to deal with under artificial or mixed lighting. Saturation controls color intensity across the whole image, and hue angle rotates the dominant color tone around the color wheel.

Those four parameters are exactly what sits under the hood of any color correction workflow, whether you're working in a camera app, a RAW editor or a professional suite. Experimenting with this tool on a photo with known colors builds intuition faster than adjusting by feel and hoping for the best.

From color extraction to a consistent look

The dominant colors the tool extracts give you an objective read of what visually dominates your frame. That's useful when you're trying to keep a series of shots consistent: you can see straight away whether skin tones, background colors or accent colors are lining up.

If you want to go further and understand how the white point affects your palette before you grade, White Balance & Color Temperature pairs well with this tool. Getting the white balance right first means your saturation and tint adjustments are working on a clean foundation.

Frequently asked questions

How do I use hue angle to shift one specific color without affecting the rest of the image?

Hue angle rotates all color tones at once, so it's not a selective adjustment. For targeted color shifts you need an HSL panel in Lightroom or Capture One. Use hue angle here to understand which direction a color moves before making that change in your editor.

When does saturation start clipping colors and how do I spot it?

Clipping happens when a color channel hits its maximum value and loses detail, usually visible as flat, plastic-looking areas in reds or oranges. Watch the dominant color swatches as you push saturation up. If a swatch goes solid with no tonal variation, you've likely clipped that channel.

Why do the extracted dominant colors not match what I see as the main color in my shot?

The extraction picks the statistically most frequent colors, not necessarily the ones that draw the most visual attention. A large neutral background can outweigh a vivid accent color that your eye is drawn to. Crop the photo to the area you want to analyze and re-upload for a more targeted result.