Available Style modules

Style modules are the building blocks of Style operations, giving you the flexibility to shape and refine the look of your footage. Each module focuses on a specific aspect of image adjustment, such as color, contrast, detail, or stylization, and can be combined to create unique visual treatments. Unlike fixed adjustments, these modules are designed for experimentation, letting you fine-tune creative choices and build layered looks that go beyond basic corrections.

Color & Contrast

This module presents the same color controls as in the first group of Adjust controls, but they are global-only. Zones are not available within Color & Contrast modules applied within a Style operation because they’re so sensitive to alterations in image tonality created by operations happening earlier in the grade.

Here’s a breakdown of the functionality of each individual Color & Contrast control.

• Contrast: The difference between the brightest and darkest pixels in an image; increasing contrast makes an image more pronounced, starker, while decreasing contrast makes an image softer, more subdued, and flatter. Contrast is a 2D control: the vertical adjustment lets you increase or decrease overall image contrast, and the horizontal adjustment lets you move the pivot point of image tonality around which contrast is expanded. By default, the pivot point is at 50% image tonality.

As you’re dragging, you can raise or lower the pivot point of the contrast adjustment while you’re adjusting contrast. For example, this lets you raise the highlights more than you’re lowering the shadows, so you don’t have to crush the shadows to get the highlights as high as you want.

This Contrast operation is linear. However, the shadows smoothly roll off into black so that global contrast blends with adjustments to other zones. However, if you’re using the Wide Gamut color management setup, the highlights that roll off due to Output tone mapping will create an S-curve effect that further smooths out the highlights in your contrast adjustment. Contrast cannot be used within a zone. However, you can augment contrast adjustments with zone-specific Exposure adjustments to retrieve details from clipped highlights by lowering exposure in a highlight zone, or to deepen lacklustre shadows by lowering exposure in a shadow zone.

The Contrast HUD shows a waveform monitor analysis of image luminance, where a graph consisting of multiple overlapping waveforms shows the ranges of luminance occupied by the pixels in each line of the image, with darker pixels appearing as dips in the waveform that fall downward closer to the bottom, and lighter pixels showing up as peaks in the waveform that stretch up farther towards the top. An indicator line shows the pivot point, and arrow indicators show the expansion of highlights and shadows stretching away from the pivot point. The Contrast value itself appears in the upper left corner.

• Exposure: Exposure adjusts image brightness by stretching the video signal towards or away from the highlights while keeping the black point pinned in place. Exposure is a 2D control where the vertical adjustment lets you increase or decrease Exposure, and the horizontal adjustment lets you increase or decrease the Black point, which determines the minimum signal level that’s allowable when using any of the Color & Contrast controls in the current adjustment. By raising the Black point, you can introduce flaring, an opening up of the details in the shadows by lifting the darkest parts of the picture. Lowering the Black point can crush or compress the darkest parts of the image.

Exposure expands or contracts luminance with a smooth roll-off at the shadows but a linear progression into the highlights. However, if you’re using the Wide Gamut color setup of color management, the highlights roll-off resulting from Output tone mapping will create an S-curve effect. When Exposure is used within a zone, each adjustment rolls off into the next zone with an automatic width, keeping transitions smooth while preventing you from inverting the signal and accidentally solarizing the image.

The Exposure HUD shows a waveform monitor analysis of the luminance range across the image, with indicators for the Black point (the MIN luminance indicator becomes the BLACK indicator when you adjust Black), and the expansion of Exposure from the Black point up (or contraction from MAX down). The Exposure value itself appears in the upper left corner, in stops. The Black value appears next to the BLACK indicator. When used within a zone, the threshold of that zone will be shown as an indicator, and the expansion or contraction of Exposure within the zone will be shown as an arrow travelling from or to that threshold.

• Temperature: Temperature is a color temperature adjustment that combines Temperature (shifting the image between warm/orange and cool/blue) via a vertical adjustment and Tint (shifting the image between green and magenta) via a horizontal adjustment, using this 2D control.

These adjustments are made via chromatic adaptation math that alters the reflected colors in the image, similarly to how changing the color of the lighting instruments would have during the original photography. Temp follows the warming and cooling of light along the black-body locus of the CIE 1931 graph. Temperature can be used within a zone.

The Temperature HUD shows a vectorscope analysis of image chrominance (hue is represented as an angle around the circle, and saturation as the distance from the center), with two arrow indicators showing the relative amount of Temperature and Tint shifting being applied along the axes of adjustment. Separate Temp and Tint values appear at each axis of adjustment.

• Balance: A traditional color balance control that lets you simultaneously rebalance the red, green, and blue channels in the image to change the overall color temperature in a freeform manner. This is a polar control: pushing the balance control from the neutral center point towards a particular hue at the edge of the color wheel tints the image with that color. Similarly, pulling the balance control away from the hue of a tint in the image that you don’t want (towards its complementary color) cancels out an unwanted color cast.

While this control affects the entire image when used globally, it rolls off towards the shadows to smoothly blend into other zones, and as a result, global use of this control avoids contaminating your deepest blacks. Similar to Temperature, Balance adjustments are made via chromatic adaptation math that alters the reflected colors in the image, as if changing the color of the lighting instruments would have during the original photography. Balance can be used within specific zones, and a smooth transition is maintained at the border between any two zones to prevent artifacts. If you like, you can force a contamination of the blacks of your image by making a large enough balance adjustment in one of the shadow zones, if that’s your thing.

The Balance HUD shows a vectorscope analysis of image chrominance (hue is represented as an angle around the circle, and saturation as the distance from the center), with a single arrow indicator showing the direction into which you’ve pushed color balance. No value appears for this control.

• Saturation: A one-dimensional control, dragging vertically intensifies or reduces the saturation or colorfulness of the image. Dragging all the way to 0 results in a black-and-white grayscale image. This control uses the same saturation algorithm as Adobe Photoshop. Saturation can be used within a zone, and if used across multiple zones provides similar functionality to the Lum vs. Sat curve found in other tools.

The Saturation HUD shows a vectorscope analysis of image chrominance (hue is represented as an angle around the circle, and saturation as the distance from the center), with a circle showing the direction into which you’re pushing saturation; out towards the edge of the ring intensifies saturation, while inward towards the center reduces saturation. A simple value from 0 to 2.0 appears for this control.

Color Shift

This module presents the same color controls as found in the second group of Adjust controls. The Color Shift controls are great for making fast and accurate tweaks to specific colors wherever they appear throughout the image. Using these controls, you can desaturate a distracting background, change the hue of an inaccurate product color, darken a range of hues that’s not rich enough, or neutralize an interview subject who’s looking a little red. If the problem you’re having with the picture can be tied to a specific hue, these controls can help.

Choose a color to adjust using Hue Swatches

To help you work quickly, this effect creates a set of color swatches corresponding to the most significant hues in the image by automatically analyzing the initial frame of the current clip, to which you moved the playhead.

Hovering the pointer over a color swatch or a Shift control shows a preview of which parts of the image overlap the selected hue as an overlay on the monitor. Selecting a swatch targets it with the Saturation, Hue, or Lum Shift controls.

If there isn’t a color patch corresponding to a hue you want to adjust, you can use the eyedropper to sample the desired color in the monitor. As you move the eyedropper over the image, an overlay shows which colors you’re targeting for sampling. Clicking samples the color you’re hovering over, and if the color you sampled is distinct enough, a new swatch will appear. If it’s not sufficiently distinct from an existing unused hue swatch the existing swatch will be updated to the new hue and selected. Otherwise, a swatch that does overlap that color will be selected in case you just didn’t recognize it.

If the first frame that was sampled wasn’t representative enough of the colors in rest of the clip, you can move the playhead to another frame in that clip, click the Plus (+) button, and choose Extract Hues (Default). The new frame will be re-analyzed and new swatches will be created.

Alternatively, you could create a standard set of Full Spectrum color swatches consisting of primary (red, green, blue), secondary (yellow, cyan, magenta), and orange hues, or a set of well-known Memory Color swatches that target common hues people expect. Both options are available in the Plus (+) menu.

Whenever you sample or load a whole new set of hues, whatever hues haven’t been adjusted yet are overwritten by the new ones. Meanwhile, hues that have been adjusted (indicated by a dot under that swatch) are retained in order not to lose adjustments you’ve already made.

Making adjustments using the Color Shift controls

Once you’ve selected the hue you want to adjust, the three available Shift controls let you adjust the Saturation, Hue, and Luminance of everything in the frame with that hue.

• Sat Shift: Dragging up raises saturation, while dragging down lowers saturation. Dragging right expands the range of neighboring hues that are adjusted by this control, while dragging left narrows the range to just the selected hue. Sat Shift is a good substitute for the Global Saturation control as you can target specific hues, raising hues that could be stronger and lowering hues that are distracting, in order to better sculpt the saturation in more sophisticated and creative ways.

The Sat Shift HUD shows a vectorscope analysis of image chrominance (hue is represented as an angle around the circle, and saturation as the distance from the center). A single pie-slice indicator shows the section of hues you’re adjusting in the Vectorscope, and it pushes out towards the edge if you raise saturation and pulls toward the center if you’re lowering saturation. The pie-slice widens and narrows as you widen and narrow the range of hues affected by this adjustment. A simple value from 100 to -100 appears for this control.

• Color Shift: Dragging up and down lets you change the hue of the targeted color by rotating it around the color wheel shown in the HUD. Dragging right expands the range of neighboring hues that are adjusted by this control, while dragging left narrows the range to just the selected hue. Color Shift is a great tool to use when there are colors that aren’t quite right, such as an actor looking a bit too green, a red product logo that looks too orange, or a cyan sky that you wish were a bit more blue.

The Color Shift HUD shows a vectorscope analysis of image chrominance (hue is represented as an angle around the circle, and saturation as the distance from the center). A blue pie-slice indication shows the section of hues you’re adjusting as they rotate around the vectorscope, while a dotted-line pie-slice shows their original location before you started rotating them. The pie-slices widen and narrow as you widen and narrow the range of hues affected by this adjustment. A simple value from 100 to -100 appears for this control.

• Lum Shift: Dragging up lightens the targeted hue, while dragging down darkens it. Dragging right expands the range of neighboring hues that are adjusted by this control, while dragging left narrows the range to just the selected hue. Lum Shift is a tricky tool to use, as larger adjustments reveal compression artifacts in the image more readily than any of the other Shift tools. However, used judiciously it can be helpful for lightening parts of the image that are difficult to target in any other way, or for adding richness to colors by darkening them just enough.

The Lum Shift HUD shows a waveform monitor analysis of image luminance, where a graph consisting of multiple overlapping waveforms shows the range of luminance occupied by the pixels in each line of the image, with darker pixels appearing as dips in the waveform that fall downward closer to the bottom, and lighter pixels showing up as peaks in the waveform that stretch up farther towards the top. While you’re making an adjustment, the parts of the waveform graph that correspond to the color you’re adjusting are highlighted, so you can see how much you’re brightening or darkening pixels consisting of the targeted hue.

Contrast Kit

This module gives more detailed control over image contrast than the Contrast and Pivot controls in the Color & Contrast module. Color & Contrast provides a linear contrast control that expands or compresses an image's overall contrast as a simple stretching operation.

By comparison, Contrast Kit creates a wide variety of “S” curves that allow you to add much more contrast by compressing the shadows and highlights of the image, letting you push contrast harder without clipping and losing image detail in the toe and shoulder of the image. This replicates a more photographic approach to contrast manipulation, with a soft roll-off at the image's extremes.

Additionally, when grading with the Output color space set to an HDR format this module focuses the majority of contrast adjustment on the black to reference white range (defined by the Graphics White setting of the color management advanced settings). This prevents HDR highlights from constantly blowing out every time you push contrast higher. The Highlights control lets you choose how much or how little of the HDR range of highlights are altered by your contrast adjustment.

The Contrast Kit controls and are described as follows:

• Compression: Drag up and down to increase or decrease contrast via an “S” curve that can be seen in the HUD while keeping the black and white points pinned in place. Drag right and left to change the compression pivot point, which is the level of image tonality on which the “S” is centered. Dragging to the right forces more compression into the Highlights and less into the shadows resulting in a brighter result, while dragging to the left forces more compression into the Shadows and less into the Highlights, resulting in a darker result. Either way, pivot lets you fine tune the ratio of highlight compression to shadow compression. By adjusting both vertical compression and the horizontal pivot, you can create a wide range of “S” shapes with which to sculp the contrast in very specific ways. It’s also possible to create inverted “S” curves that lower contrast softly, rather than raising it.
• Range: Drag down or up to linearly decrease and increase contrast linearly. Drag right and left to change the pivot point about which contrast is decreased. You cannot increase contrast beyond the default settings with this control, and the HUD shows you the range you’re limiting the signal via upper and lower thresholds. This control makes it easy to reduce contrast such that you’re raising the black point and lowering the white point, creating a more “milky” image. Any “S” curve adjustment will be applied within the range you define, which lets you combine the Range and Compression adjustments to create reduced overall contrast while adding increased midtone contrast, opening up a wide variety of low contrast looks.
• Highlights: Drag up to increase or down to decrease the range of highlights this module effects, extending into the HDR range of highlights if you’re outputting to an HDR format. Drag right and left to smooth how the top of the contrast curve integrates with HDR strength highlights.

Detail

This module presents the same color controls as found in the third group of Adjust controls. The Texture and Sharpness controls provide different methods of sharpening or softening textures at different frequencies or granularity in your images. By default, these appear in their simplest form, which lets you make fast and easy adjustments to image texture:

• Texture: A simple vertical control that lets you soften or sharpen medium-sized details of the image (there is no horizontal adjustment for Texture). Drag up from the default to sharpen, drag down from the default to soften. There is no horizontal adjustment for texture. A small button to the upper left of the Texture control lets you enable or disable Detail mode, which toggles between two methods of texture adjustment in high-resolution media that yield different results.
• Sharpness: A two-dimensional control that selectively increases contrast at edges and within fine details to create a greater impression of sharpness. Drag up to increase sharpening. Drag right to raise the threshold at which image detail is sharpened, which lets you omit smaller details from this effect to focus on sharpening the edges of more prominent details. Be aware that adding too much Sharpness can result in artifacts ringing the details being sharpened.

You can also use this control to blur the image by dragging the Sharpness below the minimum.

These two controls work together nicely to create numerous effects. For example, you can lower the Texture control to soften unwanted blemishes in a subject. Then, raise Sharpness and drag to the right to raise the threshold to ignore smaller details and add a bit of sharpness back to the edges of the subject to avoid making the image look too soft.

Advanced use of Texture and Sharpness

Clicking the Sliders button underneath either the Texture or Sharpness controls expands them to enable multi-band and multi-parameter adjustments, giving you even more precise control.

• Texture (slider mode): A set of five vertical sliders, each of which adjusts an independent band of image texture from fine (left) to coarse (right). Using these sliders, you can soften some bands of texture while sharpening others, to create extremely specific adjustments. Dragging each slider up from the default sharpens that band, while dragging each slider down from the default softens that band.
• Sharpness (slider mode): A set of three vertical sliders, that let you independently adjust all three parameters of this effect.
  • Amount: The amount of contrast applied to increase the appearance of sharpness. Raising Amount above a certain threshold automatically lowers Radius (if you’ve raised it) to make it easier to create the most naturalistic adjustments.
  • Radius: The number of pixels surrounding adjusted pixels that will alwo be affected. Raising Radius above a certain threshold automatically lowers Amount to make it easier to create the most naturalistic adjustments.
  • Threshold: Lets you omit pixels from the sharpening effect based on how different they are from the surrounding area. The practical result is that you can progressively omit fine to medium levels of detail from being sharpened, to avoid exaggerating noise and details you don’t want to sharpen, while focusing the effect on edges and more prominent high-contrast details.

Particularly with the Texture control, keep in mind that the main reason to have access to these additional sliders is not necessarily to use them all, but to have access to the right band of functionality for what you’re trying to achieve, which varies with the size of the subject and the nature of the details it contains.

Film Color

Adding the nonlinear color characteristics of film is one of the most popular grading effects there is. This module lets you combine one of 15 negative stocks with one of 6 print stocks to emulate both the color and contrast characteristics of a digital intermediate workflow.

However, this isn’t an effect you just throw onto your image and use as is. You can intensify or diminish this effect globally, in the highlights, or in the shadows, while at the same time fine-tuning how much color vs. contrast this emulation adds to your image in each tonal zone. Lastly, you can selectively reduce the Film Color effect in the midtones, bottom blacks, and top whites of the image to protect areas that you don’t want receiving as much of this effect, and you can customize the color balance in the highlights and shadows.

Film Color has the following controls:

• Negative: Lets you choose a negative stock as part of the pair of a film out digital intermediate workflow.
• Print: Lets you choose a print stock as part of the pair of a film out digital intermediate workflow.
• Strength: The primary control for exaggerating or diminishing the Film Color effect. Dragging up intensifies the effect, while dragging down reduces it. Dragging to the left reduces the extent to which image luminance is affected, while dragging to the right reduces the extent to which image color is affected.
• Midtone Protection: Lets you reduce the amount of film color in the midtones, where skin tone and product color tends to be. Dragging vertically reduces the amount of midtone color and contrast down to zero, and dragging past that widens the middle range of tonality that’s being suppressed. Dragging horizontally shifts the Midtones' pivot point, letting you adjust the suppression of this effect farther into the shadows or highlights. Changing the midtone pivot point also changes the Highlights-to-Shadows ratio for the controls below.
• Highlights: Lets you exaggerate or diminish the Film Color effect in the highlights only. Dragging up intensifies the effect, while dragging down reduces it. Dragging to the left reduces the extent to which image luminance is affected, while dragging to the right reduces the extent to which image color is affected.
• Highlight Protection: Lets you protect the top whites of the image from being affected. Useful if you want to preserve pure white.
• Highlight Balance: Lets you tweak the color balance of the film effect in the highlights.
• Shadows: Lets you exaggerate or diminish the Film Color effect in the shadows only. Dragging up intensifies the effect, while dragging down reduces it. Dragging to the left reduces the extent to which image luminance is affected, while dragging to the right reduces the extent to which image color is affected.
• Shadow Protection: Lets you protect the bottom blacks of the image from being affected. Useful if you want to preserve pure black.
• Shadow Balance: Lets you tweak the color balance of the film effect in the shadows.

Flare

This module gives more detailed control over the Black point than the Black control in the Color & Contrast module. Color & Contrast provides a simple black-level operation that raises or lowers the image's black point by a modest amount, using a fixed threshold to correct inconsistencies in the shadows.

By comparison, Flare lets you raise or lower the black point of the image relative to a custom threshold at which your operation blends in with the rest of the image, while a slope control lets you alter how gradually or sharply the change in black level is made. This lets you create stylistic alterations to the darkest levels in your image, whether you’re emulating various photographic looks or just opening up the shadows a bit for increased image legibility.

The Flare controls are described as follows:

• Flare: The primary control for adding Flare. Dragging up raises the black point, while dragging down lowers it. As the black point is adjusted, the remaining shadows are stretched to smooth the transition up to the threshold. Dragging right and left lowers or raises the threshold, indicated in the HUD by a blue line that lets you see how much of the image will be affected by the changing black point.
• Slope: Affects how steep the curve that alters the shadows is. Dragging up makes the curve steeper, resulting in a lighter result. Dragging down makes the curve shallower, resulting in a darker result.