Notes on colour.
Each note takes one idea from the grading pipeline and works through it properly — what it does, why it reads the way it does, and the numbers behind it.
Start with a photo →Grade your first clip →
Linear light is for physics, gamma is for taste
Exposure and white balance need light-proportional values. Contrast and colour need a space that behaves the way the finished image looks.
The vignette nobody notices is the one that works
A useful vignette redirects attention without drawing a visible ring. The shader curve and real preset values explain how.
Vibrance vs saturation: one has a brake
Saturation moves every colour equally. Vibrance gives muted colours more room and vivid colours less, which keeps skin safer.
Film grain belongs to the frame, not the pixel
Why grain should scale with the photograph rather than its output pixels, and what a small preview cannot honestly show.
Diffusion is a filter, not a blur
Softening an image and softening its micro-contrast are different operations, and only one of them looks like film.
Why teal and orange refuses to die
Complementary colour theory, skin tones, and the one thing every colourist knows about the orange axis.
Reading a Japanese film look, numerically
High key exposure, compressed contrast, green-leaning shade — the Komorebi preset taken apart parameter by parameter.
Halation, physically
What happens between the emulsion and the film base, and how to fake it convincingly in a fragment shader.
Lifted blacks, and why flat looks like film
Negative stock cannot reach true black. Understanding that one limitation explains most of what we call a filmic tone curve.