What's new in app.color.io 
Three powerful new scopes, usually exclusive to video editing apps, are now available in Color.io! Scopes are like histograms but more detailed and perfect for fine-tuning your colors and exposure like a pro. Scopes are available on large screen devices and can be activated by toggeling the scopes button in the top bar. Here's what they can help you with:
Quickly identify and correct color imbalances, ensuring accurate and consistent colors. The vectorscope is perfect for nailing skin tones, color contrast and harmony. It displays a circular graph where different colors are plotted around the circle. The distance from the center represents the saturation level - closer to the center means less saturated, while further out means more saturated.
This scope maps the brightness of each color channel (red, green, and blue) on a vertical scale. Unlike a histogram, which shows the overall distribution of brightness, the RGB Waveform displays how colors are distributed across the image. The horizontal axis represents the image from left to right, while the vertical axis shows the brightness levels. This helps you see and correct color imbalances and exposure issues with greater precision.
Imagine three histograms lined up side by side, one for each color channel. The RGB Parade shows the intensity of red, green, and blue across the image from left to right. This is different from a traditional histogram, which combines all color information into a single graph. By separating the channels, the RGB Parade allows you to easily spot and correct any color imbalances, ensuring each channel is perfectly aligned.
Color.io now features VisionLog 3.0 for grading raw images, providing a more contrasty and accurate starting point. This new profile, named "RAW Standard," improves adaptive contrast with smooth rolloff in shadows and highlights, ensuring faithful tonal range distribution. The old VisionLog 2.0 profile is now "RAW Flat."
The unique log-based approach treats raw images like cinema cameras, compressing the dynamic range into a log signal for incredible performance and precision. This update ensures your images look correct on display, making it easier to achieve the desired contrast and saturation.
You can now resize and freely move the scopes and histogram overlay around the viewport. It's a small step toward customizing your workspace and seeing the scopes at a larger size is a must when making detailed adjustments.
Sharing your edits just got easier! You can now export and import your grades from Color.io. Simply click the three dots next to the "Generate" button above the Preset panel to export a grade. Importing works the same way.
Images and videos now remember their zoom settings. Previously, switching to a new image would reset the zoom and positioning. Now, your zoom settings are remembered for each image, making it easier to compare different images at their preferred zoom levels.
To snap an image back to fit into the viewport, just double tap/click.
Every update of Color.io is a step forward in our shared mission to empower creatives with cutting-edge tools that push the boundaries of what's possible in film emulation and look creation. Your invaluable feedback and support shape the journey of Color.io. These updates are for you – the creators, the visionaries, the innovators.
I'm excited to see how these new features inspire and assist in bringing your creative visions to life. Thank you for all your incredible feedback and being an integral part of this journey. Here’s to many more milestones together, with even more exciting updates on the horizon!
Jonathan, Creator of Color.io
This update is a consolidation of several smaller updates released over the past few months, with a focus on improving the user experience and adding functionality based on user feedback.
This update brings the capability to add video previews and render clips within Color.io, supporting up to 4K resolution. This feature allows users to work with video content directly in the app, facilitating a seamless transition between image and video editing workflows. It's particularly useful for projects that require both photo and video content to be processed with consistent color grading and effects.
Recognizing the need for flexibility in how and where users work, Color.io now offers offline support. Once used online, the app caches necessary data, making it accessible even without an internet connection. This feature ensures that the workflow is not interrupted by connectivity issues, and is available across browsers and desktop installations, including when added to the Home Screen.
The new Border Tool enhances the app's editing capabilities, allowing users to easily add borders to images and videos. Users can control the dimensions, roundness, smoothness, and color of the border. This tool is accessible through the "Edit" option in the image workspace, and it's particularly useful for creating visually distinct content or framing content for social media and other platforms.
With this update, Crop, Rotate, and the newly added Border Tools are now applicable to both images and videos. This expansion provides a consistent and fluid editing experience across different media types, making it easier for users to apply their desired adjustments without switching between different toolsets.
A new quick-action menu has been introduced to streamline the editing process. By right-clicking on a media thumbnail in the media gallery, users can quickly access options to open the media in a duplicate or blank scene, or reset edits. This feature is designed to speed up the workflow by providing quick access to common actions, making it easier to experiment with different looks or reset adjustments as needed.
For users of compatible DJI cameras, this update includes support for the DJI D-LOG M input color space. This addition ensures that aerial footage captured with DJI cameras can be accurately graded in Color.io, offering filmmakers and drone enthusiasts more control over their color grading process.
Ten new classic film emulation presets (VC-100 - VC-X00) have been added, expanding the creative options available to users. These presets are designed to mimic the look of classic overexposed film stocks, providing an easy way to apply nostalgic or specific filmic looks to digital content.
Recognizing the importance of high-resolution outputs for professional and print uses, Color.io now supports exporting images at 300dpi. This feature ensures that users can achieve the highest quality prints and is a significant enhancement for those looking to use their digital creations in printed form.
With the growing adoption of the AVIF image format for its efficiency and quality benefits, Color.io has added support for importing AVIF files. This update allows users to work with images in this modern format, ensuring the app remains compatible with current and future image standards.
The Preset Remix feature introduces a new level of creative exploration within Color.io. Users can generate variations of any preset by clicking "Remix," which opens the Spectra AI workspace. This feature encourages experimentation and allows users to discover new looks by iterating on the generated variations.
The crop tool interface has been updated to provide a clearer view during adjustments. Now, only the rule of thirds markers are shown, and the grid displayed during rotation includes more lines for precise alignment. This enhancement makes it easier to achieve the desired composition and alignment in images.
Every update of Color.io is a step forward in our shared mission to empower creatives with cutting-edge tools that push the boundaries of what's possible in film emulation and look creation. The journey of Color.io is shaped by your invaluable feedback and support. These updates are for you – the creators, the visionaries, the innovators. I'm excited to see how these new features inspire and assist in bringing your creative visions to life.
Thank you for being an integral part of this journey. Here's to many more milestones together!
Jonathan, Creator of Color.io
Today marks another milestone for Color.io with the launch of version 2.2. The mission remains steadfast: to empower creatives with tools that redefine the boundaries of film emulation and look creation. Let's dive into what's new and improved!
The heart of this update is the enhanced Spectra AI Workspace. Building on a powerful generative film emulation model, Spectra AI now generates not one, but four distinct variations in a single pass, offering multiple creative choices at a glance. Dive deeper into any generated look by spawning infinite variations based on the generated preset you like most (Just click "More like this"). For a streamlined experience, Spectra AI now operates in its dedicated workspace, optimizing your workflow and focusing your assisted look design process. Of course, any look designed with Spectra is not a black box but a color managed, fully editable preset that can be exported to 3D LUTs, Lightroom Profiles and more.
Integration is key, and with Color.io 2.2, exporting color grades directly to a format compatible with all versions of Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Camera RAW is now seamless. Forget the hassle of manual LUT embedding; simply choose Adobe Lightroom from the export dropdown menu, and your color grade exports as an XMP profile, ready for use in your favorite Adobe software.
As always, your feedback is the lifeblood of this app. This journey is yours as much as it is mine. Thank you for being a part of it!
Jonathan | Developer
Take an exclusive sneak peek at the next major version of Color.io that is packed with tons of new and exciting features for advanced look creation and film emulation:
When I launched Color.io earlier this year, the mission was clear: Equip creatives with a tool to create industry-grade film looks with unparalleled color smoothness and control over every parameter. Today, with the introduction of Spectra AI in the Color.io App, the way we create film looks and presets is about to undergo a revolutionary change.
Spectra AI is a groundbreaking generative model that autonomously builds optimized looks and presets at the click of a button. The base model is trained on analog film and can be influenced with custom weights and biases to steer the output in a direction that aligns with your own creative vision. As you use Color.io, Spectra AI learns your personal taste and color preferences over time and adapts its output to your vision. Training your own AI model is built directly into the app - it learns as you use it, just like a social network.
Heavily requested and now a reality: Pro users can create, edit and share their own presets. Presets are saved in your cloud account and will be available across devices. While we never upload your images to our server and process everything privately on your device, being able to use your presets everywhere is going to come in super handy, especially now that Color.io 2.0 will work as an installable smartphone app.
The color science framework has been upgraded to version 2.0 with many small but noticable rendering improvements:
The film material effects now have their own dedicated work space next to the preset panel and color engine. Color.io 2.0 introduces new effects and many enhancements to existing ones:
Please be aware this is a beta version. Some functionalities may not work as intended and unforeseen glitches may arise. While I try my best to make it possible, I cannot guarantee the compatibility of presets saved with this beta when transitioning to the final release.
Your continued support, feedback, and encouragement are invaluable. Thank you!
Jonathan | Developer
This new update introduces new black and white point controls with RGB-CMY splitting, full support for iPad and Android tablets, a new and improved user guide with many in-depth tips and tricks and many small changes under the hood. Let's dive in and see what's new in the Color.io App
When working with either the new Black Point or White Point sliders, by default, all color channels are moved in unison. This means when you adjust the Black Point, for instance, you're uniformly altering the intensity of all colors in the dark areas. Likewise, the White Point slider simultaneously adjusts all color channels in the brighter regions of your image.
If you want more granular control over the colors in your blacks and whites, you can detach the channels by clicking on the link icon below the sliders. Once decoupled, each RGB-CMY channel relationship can be manipulated independently.
This decoupling feature allows you to infuse color into your blacks and whites. For instance, adjusting the Red channel in the Black Point slider can add a warm, reddish tone to your shadows, while manipulating the Blue channel in the White Point slider might add a cool tint to your highlights.
Heavily requested and now a reality: The analog color engine has been updated to take advantage of high end mobile GPUs like those built into Apple devices and top range Android phones and tablets. All controls in Color.io now work with touch input and Apple Pencil for fine tuning every knob and slider. This upate technically enables hardware accelerated HQ processing on mobile devices and paves the way to full mobile support coming in the next few weeks.
The user guide has received a major overhaul with better navigation, a clear and semantic structure and, most importantly, many in-depth tips and tricks that were previously undocumented.
https://www.color.io/user-guide/get-started
As always, thanks a ton for your help, suggestions, bug reports and encouragement!
This June update packs new tools and hands-on improvements to Color.io, designed with your input and user experience in mind. As always, a huge thank you for your continued feedback and suggestions which make updates like these possible! Let's dive in and see what's new.
First up, the new Color Range and Tone Compression tool. This tool gives you the reins to define and fine-tune color range masks based on hue, chroma, and luminance values in your images. Why is this useful? Precision and control like never before! Now, you have the power to protect skin tones or other highly specific color ranges from being affected by your overall color grade. Learn how it works.
Isolating color ranges is not all – the tool also provides a tone compression feature that unifies all colors inside of the color range to a color of your choosing. This is an absolute game-changer for skin tone and memory color fine-tuning!
This tool has been enabled for a few users for a little over a month for beta testing. This update now enables the tool for all users. Thank you for your feedback!
Next in line, I'm excited to introduce the newly-minted Crop and Rotate tool, complete with common aspect ratios.
This might appear to be a simple addition, but it's these foundational tools that often have the most profound impact on your creative workflow. Now, you can seamlessly adjust your images' orientation and size without having to rely on third party tools. Access Crop & Rotation by clicking on "Edit" next to the image gallery at the bottom of the viewport. This will open the new Image Editor. This new image editing space will serve as the foundation to include more image-specific adjustments (as opposed to scene-wide color grades) in the future.
P3 color space conversions had previously been enabled for a few users for beta testing. This update now enables these new options for all users. Thank you for your feedback!
Rounding off these exciting new features, Color.io now has extended capabilities with new Color Space Conversion options, specifically designed for photography workflows. These options include new Input and Output Device Transforms (IDTs and ODTs) that allow for flawless round-tripping between applications in Display P3 workflows. Now, if you're working in P3 in Adobe Photoshop or other third party software, and you want that exact same image in Color.io, you're all covered! Just select the P3 profiles from the IDT and ODT dropdowns in the color space conversion category. While this may seem like a small addition, the required changes to how color management works under the hood will open up new opportunities for enhanced interoperability and workflow continuity across different platforms and software tools, paving the way for more robust and seamless color grading experiences in the future.
Following your feedback, I've made some under-the-hood adjustments to enhance the usability, performance and functionality of Color.io. As always, a huge thank you for your continued feedback and suggestions which make updates like these possible!
Jonathan | Creator of Color.io
The RAW image processor in Color.io just got a major upgrade - the new and improved VisionLog Raw curve has significantly better highlight and shadow protection and softer color gradations. The color science is now closely aligned with the internal ACEScct working space so you'll also see a better overall color response when grading raw images in VisionLog 2.0.
VisionLog RAW 2.0 is the new default for all raw image processing in Color.io, so for new images, you don't have to do anything to enable it.
However, if you currently have any raw images loaded into the app, you have to re-interpret them using the updated process.
Just follow these three simple steps to do that:
The latest version of Color.io comes with an improved halation algorithm and updated control behaviour. The new algorithm improves the glow core with exponential light falloff and color gradation to more accurately simluate real film halation. The new grain engine has also been adjusted to reach deeper into the glow of the highlights. The new version is live at app.color.io so give it a try and let me know what you think!
In this April update, you'll discover exciting new features, numerous improvements, bug fixes, and more. I hope these changes will make Color.io even better for you. Thank you for all your feedback!
This latest update introduces the brand-new Material Panel, which contains new and improved image processing effects. Just like the color science in Color.io, the material effects are inspired by the appearance and development behavior of analog film, emulating some of its structural and optical properties. To demonstrate its effectiveness, let's play a little game. Below are three images based on the same photo taken by photographer Shihab Chowdhury on Cinestill 800T film. The first image has all film grain, color, softness, and halation removed. Either Image 2 or 3 is the original film photo; the other has been recreated from Image 1 entirely using Color.io. Can you tell which is which?
*Find the answer at the bottom of this post...
Grain is the foundation of the new film structure emulation in Color.io. Rather than overlaying grain textures like most other software, the new structure emulator deconstructs the image and rebuilds it pixel-by-pixel using synthetically generated granules. This results in an incredibly organic look because the underlying pixel structure of digital images is entirely reconstructed to match the grain distribution, density, rotation, size, and color gradation of real film.
Film softness introduces a new blur algorithm based on the size and variance of a film grain pattern. It simulates the absence of high-frequency detail in analog film and is driven by the volumetric distribution of the grain engine. Film Acutance is a novel approach to adding sharpness to images. Unlike traditional sharpening, the new acutance emulation rearranges the film granules so that they are more densely packed around high-contrast edges of an image. This enhances image sharpness in a very organic way because the edge enhancement consists of grains, which are always larger than digital pixels.
The film halation effect has been updated for more realistic glow behavior and improved highlight detail protection. You can now also control the brightness threshold at which halation occurs. Additionally, a new vignette control allows you to darken or brighten the edges of your images with a smooth falloff toward the center, regulated by the radius slider.
Sharing presets with others is now easier with the ability to generate a URL from the Export panel. You can toggle individual components on and off, making it possible to create preset URLs for an entire color grade, just the spectrum panel, or any combination of effect panels you need. When you click "Generate URL," Color.io will copy a special preset link to your clipboard. Pasting that link into the address bar of a web browser will apply your preset.
As many of you requested, the before/after behavior has been updated. When you reveal the original image by clicking and holding the mouse down or by toggling the new "Master Bypass" switch, the color grade and material effects are disabled, but the ACES IDT and ODT now remain intact.
Note that this new behavior applies to the Master Bypass, Master Mix, and Temporary Bypass (click and hold viewport for 1 second) but not to the Split Screen view. Split screen will always reveal the original, non-color-managed image.
A minor color science adjustment has been made to the luminance curve. Previously, the curve introduced excessive highlight bleaching due to too much crosstalk with the chrominance channels. This issue has been addressed, resulting in a curve that is now closer to a perceptually neutral contrast adjustment. To simulate the previous behavior, you can desaturate the highlights using the Density vs Luma curve in the Density panel above.
While this update covers various aspects of the app, a significant portion of the new features primarily benefit photographers. Therefore, the next update will be dedicated to enhancing the DCTL generator for colorists, with some exciting developments planned. Stay tuned, and as always, thank you so much for the incredible feedback and suggestions you have provided, making Color.io and this update possible!
Jonathan | Color.io
*The second image is the original film photo, and the third has been created from Image 1 using nothing but the film color and structure emulation tools in Color.io. I deliberately dialed up the smoothness a bit further than I would have done, had it not been my intention to mislead you 😈
Todays minor update introduces a new export format option for Pro users, important bug fixes and a lot of internal work that paves the road for the next major version update!
A previous update introduced tiled rendering to support very high resolution exports that do not overwhelm the WebGL rendering core. There was a rounding error in the tile calculation that partitions the image rectangle into the sub-grid for rendering that caused a half pixel shift for exported images, resulting in a slightly blurred image. This has now been fixed and full resolution exports are pixel-perfectly-crisp now.
Previously, LUTs exported for an ACES working space could contain NaN (Not a Number) errors in the lattice, resulting in "holes" in the LUT file. This was due to the inability to index out-of-range values which can occur in ACES. This has been fixed by extending the index range for the internal output transformers and NaN errors should be a thing of the past.
This update introduces Tiff as a new export format available for Pro Users. There's not much to say about this other than it's a standard tiff implementation that supports an alpha channel. There's generally no quality gain over lossless PNG but TIFF might come in handy for some workflows so choose it when you need it.
Color.io allows you to design looks that can be integrated into third party ACES color managed workflows. I added documentation on how to export LUTs for an ACES working space in Davinci Resolve with some pointers on how to setup your node structure and ACES transforms: https://www.color.io/user-guide/using-color-io-with-davinci-resolve
A lot of things have changed under the hood as I'm preparing the first major update since Color.io soft-launched one month ago. Thanks to the amazing feedback I got from users via email, this feedback board and via lift-gamma-gain.com, a clear vision of where the app should be headed next, has been established:
Right now, all adjustments are scene specific, meaning that the same color grade is applied to every image in a scene. While this is very useful, it would be even better if some adjustments could be made on a per-image basis. This requires some architectural changes of the processing core but it's the right direction to take. Things like grain and halation as well as basic exposure and saturation corrections make more sense to be applied as a per-image pre-processing step before color grading. This will also open the door to masking and additional image correction tools for photographers.
The next major update will introduce advanced film acutance and grain modeling emulation that I'm super excited about. What makes this new model incredibly powerful is that it breaks the image apart and re-builds it, pixel-by-pixel, from physically accurate grain patterns with varying density. This approach completely changes the pixel structure of digital photos, introducing a subtle but powerful meta layer that further blurs the lines between digital and film. This module will replace the current grain implemention and will be part of the image specific adjustments. I'm currently working on optimizing the real time rendering of the acutance distribution.
Some of you probably remember the subtractive CMY channel mixer I had in an early alpha release of the app. I sacrificed it for adding the grain and halation modules into the main interface for the public release but since grain and halation will be moved into the image editing tool section of the next version, you can expect a return of the cmy channel mixer into the luminance panel. It is a great tool to "finish" a look. I'm thinking about splitting it up into shadows and highlights, similar to the Refraction emulator. Let me know your ideas!
As always, thank you so much for using the app and for providing me with the feedback and bug reports that make all of this possible. I launched Color.io with the sincere desire to improve and extend features based on user feedback to create the most useful tool for my own work and others. I could't be more grateful for the response the app has received so far and looking forward to where we're going next!
Jonathan | Color.io
Todays update introduces a new option to install Color.io to your desktop, export to different color spaces, bug fixes and improvements!
Color.io is a progressive web application (PWA). Progressive Web Apps run in the browser but they can also be installed as fullscreen apps on many devices.
Desktop PWA installation is currently supported by Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Edge on Linux, Windows, macOS, and Chromebooks. These browsers will show an install badge (icon) in the URL bar (see the image below), stating that Color.io is installable.
Thanks to your feedback, there's now also an option to override the color management for exporting LUTs and DCTLs into third party workflows. This allows you to embed any look you create in Color.io in an ACES working space project or timeline. You can find the export color space override at the bottom of the export panel:
I'm currently laying the ground work for two major improvements for the app:
As always, thanks a ton for all of your feedback and suggestion! May you be peaceful, may you be happy.
Jonathan | Color.io
We started publishing to the official Color.io user guide, staring with the user interface handbook. Daily contributions are already scheduled so check back frequently as we're building up the support pages for full scale release.
Pro users lost their pro capabilities after some time without automatic session refresh. This has been fixed and pro users stay signed in as expected.