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Colour, Grade and Scopes.

Grade is one effect that does the job of several: wheels, sliders, curves and a LUT, applied in that order. Put it on a layer to fix one shot, or on the whole composition for a look, and check the result on the Scopes instead of trusting your screen.

Add a Grade

  1. Open the Effects tab and find Grade. Search filters the list (Ctrl+F).
  2. Drag it onto a layer, or select the layer and double-click Grade or press Enter. With nothing selected, it goes on the composition and grades everything in it.
  3. Its section appears in the layer's Effects in the Inspector, with Primary, Curves and LUT.

Every value can be keyed, and Limit to confines the Grade to a mask, such as a face cut out with roto. See Confine an effect.

Primary

Lift, Gamma, Gain
Three colour wheels side by side, for the shadows, the mid-tones and the highlights, each with a master slider underneath for its brightness.
Offset
Moves every level of red, green and blue by the same amount.
Temperature, Tint
The white the picture is balanced to, in kelvin, starting at 6504 K, and the tint between green and magenta.
Exposure
Brightness in stops: +1 is twice the light.
Contrast, Pivot
Contrast around a pivot level, starting at 0.18, a mid grey in linear light.
Saturation
Colour strength in percent; 100 leaves it as it is.

Curves

Choose the curve to show: Master, Red, Green or Blue, or Hue vs Saturation and Hue vs Luminance to change one colour's strength or brightness without touching the rest.

  • Drag a point to move it, and double-click to add one. Delete removes the selected point.
  • Select a point to type its exact position in X and Y.
  • Alt with the wheel zooms, the middle button pans, and F frames the curve.

A point that's keyed is changed at its keys on the Timeline.

LUT

The LUT step applies a look or a transform after Primary and Curves:

None
Leaves the colour as it is.
File
A LUT file imported into the project: .cube, .3dl, or another format OpenColorIO reads. Once it's in the project, choose it as the LUT file.
Colour space
A transform from one colour space to another.

Input space and Output space say which spaces the LUT reads and writes, and Strength mixes its result with the colour before it, in percent.

How footage colour is read

Select a piece of footage. Its Footage section has Colour space: how its colours are read, before any effect. Auto reads the footage's own colour metadata. Choose a colour space instead when the metadata is missing or wrong, such as a camera log recording; every clip of that footage follows.

The working colour space

Grapple manages colour with OpenColorIO and its built-in ACES configuration. Footage comes into a linear working space, layers mix there at floating-point precision, and the export converts to the output colour you choose: SDR in BT.709, or HDR with PQ or HLG. Light above white is kept until the export, so a bright highlight survives a Grade that brings it down.

Check with Scopes

Open Scopes from the Window menu. It measures the composition's output frame, without fully transparent pixels, and refreshes as you work.

Histogram
How many pixels sit at each brightness. A pile against either edge means clipped shadows or highlights.
Waveform
Brightness across the width of the frame, so you can see which part is too bright or too dark.
RGB parade
Red, green and blue side by side. Even levels on a white or grey area mean a neutral balance.
Vectorscope
Hue and saturation. Skin tones gather along one line, and a cast pulls everything one way.

The Histogram, Waveform and parade measure SDR output in sRGB from 0 to 255. Judge HDR on an HDR display.

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