Exp 02
Live colour grade
A colourist’s desk in the browser: grade my footage with colour wheels, white balance and film looks, compare before and after, and read the scopes as you go.
- Date
- October 2026
- Built with
- WebGL 2 · Three.js · GLSL · Video textures
How it’s made
The idea
Grading is where footage gets its mood: the same shot can feel like a cold morning or a warm memory. Here you sit at the desk with three of my dawn shots from Anna, and every change happens live on the moving image.
The same order as a grading suite
Every frame of the video goes through a shader that applies the corrections in the order DaVinci Resolve would: white balance, exposure, lift, gamma and gain, contrast around a mid-grey pivot, and saturation. The colour wheels push the shadows, mid-tones and highlights towards a hue without changing their brightness.
Looks are just settings
Each look moves the wheels and sliders to its own position, so you can see how teal and orange, a film print or a bleach bypass are built, and carry on from there. The curtain keeps the untouched original on one side to compare.
Scopes, as on set
About twelve times a second a small copy of the graded frame is read back from the graphics card. From it the page draws a waveform, which shows the brightness of every column, and a vectorscope, which shows every hue and how saturated it is, with the skin-tone line as a reference.