Video Color Adjust

How the Video Color Adjust works

Phone cameras guess exposure and white balance every second, and they often guess wrong. Indoor clips come out orange, overcast footage looks grey, and anything shot against a window turns the subject into a silhouette. A small correction fixes most of it.

What each video color adjust slider does

All four sliders start at neutral, so the clip is unchanged until you move one.

Adjustments are applied in that order, and then the chosen look is applied on top. A look does not reset the sliders, so you can brighten a clip and make it black and white in one render.

The looks

• Warm: a light sepia tint with a little extra saturation. It cancels the blue cast of shade and overcast days.
• Cool: a small hue shift towards blue and a touch of brightness. It counters orange indoor lighting.
• Black and white: full greyscale. Raise Contrast to 120% for a stronger monochrome look.
• Sepia: a strong brown tone, like an old photograph.
• Vintage: partial sepia with lower contrast and saturation, the faded look of old film.
• High contrast: 40% more contrast and 20% more saturation, for flat, low-contrast footage.

How it works

Each frame is drawn onto a canvas through the browser's canvas filter, the same filter functions CSS uses: brightness, contrast, saturate, hue-rotate, sepia and grayscale. The canvas is recorded with MediaRecorder, along with the original audio, so the render takes as long as the clip. Chrome, Edge and Firefox support canvas filters. Browsers that do not will show an error rather than a clip with no change.

Tips and pitfalls

Small moves look better. Grading that is obvious in a still frame looks heavier still in motion. Change one slider at a time and stay within about 20% of neutral unless you want a stylised look.

Brightness cannot recover lost detail. Lifting a very dark clip brings up noise along with the picture, and a blown-out sky stays white. Brighten to rescue a dim clip, not a black one.

Skin tones go first. Large hue shifts and heavy saturation make faces look ill or sunburnt. If people are in shot, check their skin in the result before anything else.

Grade before you add text. Run this tool before the subtitle burner or watermark, so captions and logos keep their true colours.

How to read the result

The stats show the exact filter string that was applied, such as brightness(1.2) contrast(1.1) saturate(1) hue-rotate(0deg), and the new file size. Play the result next to the original to judge the change, then Download.

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