Evidor
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Color Grading

Every video or image clip has its own color pipeline. The tools live in the inspector, under the Color section. This page walks through each group: basic color, color wheels, curves, HSL secondary, and LUTs.

How the pipeline works

When a clip is rendered, its color adjustments are applied in this order:

  1. Basic color: brightness, contrast, saturation, exposure, temperature, tint, vibrance, highlights, shadows
  2. Color wheels: lift, gamma, gain
  3. Curves: RGB, then R, G, B
  4. Detail enhance
  5. HSL secondary
  6. 3D LUT
  7. Vignette
  8. Film grain

This order is fixed. If the clip is displayed with a GPU, the basic color group is computed on the GPU for speed. If a GPU is not available, or if any advanced feature (wheels, curves, HSL, LUT, detail enhance) is active, the whole pipeline falls back to the CPU for that frame.

Basic color

Each slider in the Basic group is independent. None of them clips the image by itself; they stack.

  • Brightness - a simple linear multiplier, from 0% to 200%. 100% is neutral.
  • Contrast - pushes pixels away from mid-grey. 100% is neutral.
  • Saturation - scales color away from its luma. 0% is greyscale, 200% is over-saturated.
  • Exposure - a stop-based multiplier, from -100 to 100. It is applied before the other controls, in the linear domain.
  • Temperature - warms or cools the image by shifting red and blue channels in opposite directions.
  • Tint - shifts green and magenta, typically to correct white balance after the temperature has been set.
  • Vibrance - boosts saturation more on desaturated pixels than on already-saturated ones, which keeps skin tones from clipping.
  • Highlights - lifts or crushes the brightest pixels, using a quadratic falloff.
  • Shadows - lifts or crushes the darkest pixels, using the same kind of falloff.

Every one of these sliders has a small diamond button next to it. Clicking that button creates a keyframe at the playhead, letting the value animate over the clip's duration.

Color wheels

Below the Basic group are three wheels: Lift, Gamma, and Gain. These correspond to shadows, midtones, and highlights, and are modelled on the primary grading wheels found in professional tools.

Click anywhere inside a wheel to place its dot. The dot's distance from the centre controls how strong the shift is, and its angle around the circle determines which hue it targets.

  • Lift - shifts the color balance of the shadows. Pushing the dot toward blue tints the dark areas blue without affecting the highlights.
  • Gamma - shifts the color balance of the midtones. This is where skin tones live, so use it carefully.
  • Gain - shifts the color balance of the highlights. Pushing toward orange warms up a sunset, for example.

Double-click a wheel to reset its dot to the centre. The dots in each wheel persist with the clip, so you can copy a graded clip to another spot on the timeline and the wheels come with it.

Curves

The curves editor is a 256-point RGB mapping. It has four channels: RGB (master), R, G, and B. Each channel is a separate curve.

  • Click anywhere inside the grid to add a point.
  • Drag a point to move it. The curve interpolates linearly between points.
  • Right-click a point to remove it. The two endpoints cannot be removed.
  • Click Reset to return the current channel to a straight diagonal line.

The RGB channel is applied first, then the R, G, and B channels are applied on top. Because RGB is applied to all three channels at once, it is useful for setting overall contrast, while the per-channel curves handle color balance.

HSL secondary

HSL secondary lets you target a specific range of hues and adjust them independently of the rest of the image. This is how you would change the colour of a shirt without touching the sky.

Check Enable to turn the control on, then:

  • Hue - the centre of the hue range you want to target, in degrees on the color wheel.
  • Range - how many degrees either side of the centre hue are fully included.
  • Softness - how many extra degrees past the range fade in gradually. This smooths the edges of the selection.
  • Hue shift - rotates the targeted hues to a new hue. This is what actually changes the color.
  • Saturation - how much the targeted pixels get desaturated or over-saturated. -100 is fully desaturated, 100 is double saturation.
  • Luminance - lightens or darkens the targeted pixels.

The HSL secondary cannot be keyframed as a whole, but individual sliders can be keyframed with their diamond buttons.

LUTs

A LUT (lookup table) is a pre-computed color transform stored as a .cube file. Evidor supports 3D LUTs from size 2 up to size 129 (i.e. up to 129 x 129 x 129 entries).

To load one, click Load .cube in the LUT group of the Color section. The file is read locally and stored inside the project. Loaded LUTs are listed in the Applied LUT dropdown next to the button. A project can hold up to 32 LUTs at once.

The Intensity slider blends between the original image and the fully applied LUT. 0% is the untouched original, 100% is the full LUT. Intermediate values are useful for softening a LUT that would otherwise be too strong.

LUT storage LUTs are embedded in the .evi project file, so the project remains self-contained. A LUT cannot exceed 2 MB in the project file.

Presets

The Presets section of the inspector lets you capture a whole color setup as a named preset and reuse it later.

  • Apply preset - a dropdown listing the built-in presets and any presets you have saved.
  • Apply - applies the selected preset to the current clip.
  • Save as preset - captures the current clip's color settings under a name you choose.
  • Delete - removes the selected user preset. Built-in presets cannot be deleted.
  • Export - writes all user presets to an .evipreset file, which is a small JSON document.
  • Import - reads an .evipreset file and merges its presets into your library.

Presets capture everything in the color pipeline: basic color, wheels, curves, HSL secondary, LUT id, LUT intensity, detail enhance, blend mode, chroma key, and masks. They do not capture transform, speed, transitions, or audio settings.

Applying the same grade to multiple clips

The fastest way to match two clips is to grade one, save the result as a preset, then apply that preset to the other. Alternatively, select multiple clips and change a slider while all of them are selected: because most inputs apply only to the most recently selected clip, this is rarely the right tool. In practice, the preset workflow is almost always quicker.

GPU color grading

When Evidor is running on a machine with WebGPU support and the GPU color grade option is enabled in the View menu, the basic color group runs on the GPU. Advanced features (wheels, curves, HSL, LUTs, masks, chroma key, cleanup) are still computed on the CPU, so a clip using any of those falls back entirely to the CPU path for that frame.

You can disable GPU color grading at any time from the View menu. This is useful if you see any flickering or banding that might be caused by the GPU pass.