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Start from a ready-made film look, set how strong it is, then shape the wheels, tints and texture yourself. The clip is graded on your device and never leaves it.
Cinematic color grading is a handful of choices a film colourist makes on almost every shot: contrast that bends softly at both ends, a palette limited to two or three families of colour, skin that still looks like skin, and highlights that glow rather than clip. The tool above opens with Feature Film, one of our Cinematic looks. Press All looks (L) to try the others on your own frame, set Intensity, and switch on Before and after (B) to see what changed.
Colour is only part of the effect. Framing, light and camera movement do most of the work, and no grade turns a shaky, flatly lit clip into a feature. What a good grade does is make a decent shot feel deliberate. If you are after one specific palette, the teal and orange page covers the blockbuster look, and the film look page is about grain, halation and the colour of a negative. For the bigger picture, read what colour grading actually is.
Drop the video onto the tool or choose Select video (Ctrl/Cmd+O). The first frame appears with Feature Film already applied so you can judge it straight away.
Press All looks (L) and pick the Cinematic or Moody chip. Arrow keys try each look on your frame, and [ and ] step through them once the gallery is closed.
(enlarge image) The Cinematic chip in All looks shows every cinematic look on your own frame.
Drag Intensity (or press - and =) until the look supports the shot instead of shouting over it. Turn on Before and after (B) and drag the divider across a face.
(enlarge image) Before and after splits the preview so you can judge the grade against the original.
Open Pro tools (P). Nudge Lift towards blue-green and Gain towards warm on the Wheels tab, then add a touch of Grain, Halation or Vignette on the Effects tab.
Choose Export video (Ctrl/Cmd+Enter) and pick High under Quality if the clip has fine texture. When it finishes, select Download video.
Audiences have absorbed a century of film prints and decades of digitally finished features, so they recognise the signature even if they cannot name it. Most of it comes from a few measurable traits rather than any single magic filter.
Film negative and print never jump straight from detail to pure black or pure white; the response curves gently at both ends. Phone video tends to do the opposite, with crisp, sharply clipped highlights and contrast tuned to look punchy on a small screen. A cinematic grade rounds those corners: the deepest shadows keep a trace of colour and the brightest areas fade into white instead of snapping. Fade in the Basic tab and the shape of the Master curve on the Curves tab both control this.
Films are designed in colour. Production designers and costume departments choose a few related hues, and the grade then pulls stray colours towards them. That is why a restrained grade often looks more expensive than a saturated one: lowering Saturation a little and letting one or two colours carry the image gives the frame a point of view. The HSL tab lets you quieten a single distracting colour, such as a lime-green bin in the background, without touching anything else.
Many graded shots place cooler colour in the shadows and warmer colour in the highlights and on faces. Our eyes read warm as near and cool as far, so the subject seems to stand forward. Shadow tint and Highlight tint on the Effects tab add this split toning directly, and Tint balance decides where the shadow colour hands over to the highlight colour.
A clean digital image can feel clinical. A little Grain, a gentle Vignette that draws the eye inwards, and a hint of Halation round lamps and windows all soften that edge. Keep each one subtle: if someone notices the effect before the picture, it is too strong.
A moody grade sets a tone of tension, melancholy or quiet rather than simply making things gloomy. The Moody chip in the gallery collects looks built on lower saturation, cooler or greener shadows and a deliberately limited range of warm accents, which is the combination most people mean when they search for one.
A “cinematic LUT” is a colour lookup table: it maps every input colour to an output colour and nothing more. It cannot add grain, a vignette, glow or halation, because those depend on neighbouring pixels rather than on each colour alone. Many downloadable packs are also built for a particular input, often a camera’s log footage, and look wrong on ordinary phone video.
Every look on this site is an original, parametric grade made here, and the colour part of any of them can be saved with Export .cube (Shift+L) for use in another editor. The free LUTs page explains what you get and what stays behind. If you already have a LUT you like, apply it to your video here instead.
Open it above, try the Cinematic looks with All looks, set Intensity to taste and add a little Grain and Vignette. At shooting time, lock the frame rate to 24 or 25 fps, avoid auto exposure jumps and light faces from the side; those choices matter as much as the grade.
Gentle contrast at both ends of the range, a restrained palette, warm subjects set against cooler surroundings, and natural skin. Texture such as grain and soft highlight glow completes the impression.
Not quite. A LUT carries colour only, so it covers the palette and contrast curve but not grain, vignetting or halation. Many cinematic LUTs also expect log footage and look harsh on normal video.
Choose a look from the Moody chip, or lower Saturation, add a cool Shadow tint and keep faces near the skin tone line on the Vectorscope. Moody does not mean murky: the subject should still be easy to see.
Not here; the tool changes colour and texture, not the shape of the frame. Crop or add bars in your editor after grading, or shoot with the framing in mind.
Yes. Use Copy grade (Shift+C) on the first clip, open the next one and use Paste grade (Shift+V). Save as my look keeps it in My looks in this browser for later sessions.
Yes. It runs in modern browsers on phones and computers and opens MP4, MOV, WebM and MKV. Phone video is often already contrasty and saturated, so cinematic looks usually need less Intensity on it.