Grade colour

Wabcut grades with a single effect that covers a full delivery grade: basic correction, a creative look, curves, colour wheels, a secondary and a vignette. The grade renders the same way in the Program Monitor and in the export. "Auto" and "Match" don't bake in a result. They set ordinary sliders that you can keep adjusting.

Open the Color workspace#

Press Alt+Shift+5 to open your first Color workspace. If you don't have one, the same key makes one. You can also choose "+" after the workspace tabs and pick the Color preset. It lays out the "Scopes" panel, the Program Monitor, the "Color" panel and the timeline.

The "Color" panel grades the selected video clip. When no clip is selected, it grades the topmost clip under the playhead.

Correct a clip#

The panel's sections run in a fixed order:

• Each section has its own on/off switch and a reset. The switch at the top of the panel turns the whole grade off.
• A section left at its neutral values changes nothing.
• One drag is one undo step.
• The grade is an effect in the clip's effect stack. Its sliders keyframe like any other effect's; curves and LUTs can't be keyframed.

To grade only part of the picture, mask the grade. See Mask, track and redact.

Fix a shot with Auto#

Choose "Auto". Wabcut sets the white balance from the most neutral parts of the picture, so grass, sky or a red wall aren't mistaken for a colour cast. Then it sets the exposure, whites and blacks from the picture's spread of brightness. Auto looks at the clip without its own grade and fills in "Basic Correction", where you can keep adjusting. It doesn't use machine learning.

Pick out one colour#

1. Open "HSL Secondary" and choose "Pick colour".
2. Click the colour in the Program Monitor. The hue, saturation and luma ranges centre on that spot.
3. Choose a "Show mask" view to see what is selected, and adjust the ranges and their softness. "Invert" selects everything else; denoise and blur clean up a ragged selection.
4. Make the correction with the section's sliders.

Compare before and after#

The "Compare & Match" section switches the Program Monitor between "Off", "Before / After" and "Reference":

• "Before / After" splits the picture with a divider you can drag. The left side shows the clip without its grade.
• "Reference" puts the reference frame (see below) next to the program, held as a still.

Comparison views only appear on the monitor. They never reach an export.

Match one shot to another#

1. Put the playhead on a frame you like and choose "Set reference". The program at the playhead becomes the reference frame.
2. Select the clip you want to change.
3. Set "Strength" (100 % goes all the way). Turn on "Skin tone priority" when faces matter.
4. Choose "Match".

Match sets the clip's exposure, contrast, temperature, tint and saturation so that its colours move towards the reference. "Skin tone priority" counts skin-coloured pixels four times as much in both pictures. It doesn't detect faces.

Match a whole scene#

A long take cut into shots (for example with Split at Shots) should look the same from shot to shot.

1. Grade one of the shots and select it.
2. Choose "Match scene".

The other shots of that take are matched to the selected one, in one undo step. These are the clips cut from the same media that sit next to each other on its track, with no gaps. "Strength" and "Skin tone priority" apply here too. The "Match Scene" command in the command palette can also match every clip on the track, or every clip of the same media.

Grade multicam clips#

Since 0.1.2, "Auto", "Match" and "Match scene" work on multicam clips. They look at the angle the clip shows, and the grade goes on that clip. To grade a camera everywhere it is used, grade its angle in the multicam source sequence instead. See Multicam.

Apply a look or a LUT#

Wabcut has built-in looks and camera conversions. No LUT files are shipped; each one is generated when you first use it.

The input LUTs expect legal-range files. Canon Log 3 and Apple Log aren't built in. Import the camera maker's own .cube file instead.

Use your own LUT. In the input LUT or look menu, choose "Import .cube…". Wabcut reads .cube files (Adobe's Cube LUT format 1.0, and Resolve's form with a 1D shaper and a 3D table), up to 65 points per side in 3D and 65,536 entries in 1D. If a file can't be read, the message names the line with the first problem.

An imported LUT becomes part of the project, and importing the same file again reuses it. If you move the file, Wabcut lists it with your offline media, by its name followed by "(LUT)": relink it with File > "Relink Offline Media…". Until then the LUT's stage is skipped and the panel says the LUT is missing. File > "Collect Files…" copies the LUTs a project uses into a LUTs folder.

Read the scopes#

The "Scopes" panel shows the picture as the Program Monitor shows it:

• The waveform: "Luma", "RGB Parade" or "YCbCr".
• The "Vectorscope": zoom 1x, 2x or 5x, with 75 % and 100 % targets and a skin-tone line.
• A histogram of red, green, blue and luma.
• A line of statistics: a verdict ("underexposed", "overexposed", "low contrast", "clipped highlights", "crushed blacks" or "ok"), the median brightness in IRE with its 1 % and 99 % points, how much is clipped, and the colour cast.

The scopes update about 30 times a second, on a paused frame too. They only run while the panel is visible, so they cost nothing elsewhere. Scripts can read them with wabcut-cli scopes; see Colour.

Exchange grades as CDL#

The colour wheels are an ASC CDL (version 1.2), so they move to and from other grading tools.

• "Export CDL…" (in "Color Wheels") writes a .cc file for one clip, or a .ccc or .cdl file for several. The ids are the clip names.
• "Import CDL…" reads them. It matches each grade to a clip by name, otherwise by position. Values out of range are clamped, with a warning.

Edit HDR game captures#

Wabcut projects are SDR (Rec.709). OBS, Xbox Game Bar and ShadowPlay record HDR games in BT.2020 with PQ or HLG. Read as SDR, such a file would look washed out with clipped highlights. Wabcut tone-maps these captures to SDR as it reads them, automatically from the file's own tags. There is no setting.

Mid-tones pass through unchanged. Highlights roll off so that the brightest part of a 1000-nit master lands on SDR white, and colours are converted to Rec.709. The monitor, exports, review frames and thumbnails all show the same tone-mapped picture.