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Vixlo 0.1

Colour: white balance, saturation and the colour editor

Press ⌃2 for Colour. The first three sections are the colour work most frames need: setting what colour the light was, deciding how colourful the frame is, and then reaching into one colour at a time. The three sections after them — Colour grading, Black and white and Look — have a page of their own.

White balance​

The White balance section opens first on this tab. Temperature and Tint each run from −100 to +100, and both start at 0, which is the frame as shot. A positive Tint adds magenta and a negative one adds green.

The White balance section with the eyedropper armed and the Presets menu

In Vixlo 0.1

Temperature moves the picture the opposite way to the one its name suggests. Move the slider to the right and the frame goes bluer; move it to the left and the frame goes more amber. The presets and the sentences you ask for in Asking for an adjustment go the same way, so a request for warmer cools the frame and the Tungsten preset warms it. Tint is not affected. The way around is to judge by the picture, not by the slider's direction: move Temperature whichever way gives the colour you want. The eyedropper below is the surest route, because it measures what the frame does and needs no direction at all.

Directly under the two sliders sit the Eyedropper and a Presets menu. Both write through the same two sliders; nothing new is stored.

Setting it from a neutral​

  1. Press Eyedropper. The chip highlights and reads Click the photo….
  2. Click something in the photograph you know was neutral: a grey card, a white wall, a shirt.
  3. Both sliders move together in one step, and the bar under the frame says what was sampled and what changed. One ⌘Z takes both back.

Esc, or pressing the chip again, puts the eyedropper away. It samples a small patch from the rendered preview, exactly what is on screen. If the patch cannot be made neutral it says so rather than dragging both sliders to their limit: That patch couldn't be neutralised within Vixlo's temperature and tint range — it isn't a neutral reference. Try a grey or white area instead. A patch that is too dark gets its own message asking for a brighter neutral area.

The presets​

Presets offers As shot, Daylight, Cloudy, Shade, Tungsten and Fluorescent. Choosing one sets both sliders outright, as a fixed nudge from as-shot; As shot puts both back to 0. They are relative, not measured: Vixlo has no reading of the light a photograph was actually taken under, so no preset claims a colour temperature.

On a RAW file, Temperature and Tint are applied inside the RAW decoder, where the sensor's own data is still available. See The RAW stage.

Saturation and Vibrance​

The Saturation section holds two sliders, each −100 to +100.

  • Saturation moves every colour by the same amount.
  • Vibrance moves the muted colours more and leaves skin alone.

For a frame with people in it, reach for Vibrance first.

The colour editor​

The Colour editor section is for work the global sliders cannot do: Saturation above is one number for the whole frame and cannot deepen a sky without also touching skin.

The Colour editor on its Saturation channel, eight bands each with a coloured dot

Eight bands — Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Aqua, Blue, Purple, Magenta — each with Hue, Saturation and Luminance, every slider from −100 to +100. The panel shows one channel at a time: choose Hue, Saturation or Luminance at the top and the eight rows beneath belong to it. Switching channel changes nothing on the frame.

  • Hue rotates the band, by up to about 30° at full throw — far enough to push Red convincingly toward orange, never clean past yellow into green.
  • Saturation at −100 takes the band exactly to neutral; +100 doubles it.
  • Luminance lifts the band toward white or drops it toward black.

A colour between two bands is shared between exactly those two, so the eight bands together are always the whole photograph. Greys are left alone: a neutral has no hue for a band to claim, so a grey wall stays put while the red jacket in front of it moves. The reset arrow on the section's header clears all twenty-four sliders, not just the eight on screen, and the sampled colours below with them.

Sampling a colour​

Beneath the bands sits point colour: adjust the colour you clicked rather than the band it falls in.

One sampled point colour with its swatch, three shifts and Range

  1. Press Sample a colour. The chip reads Click the photo….
  2. Click the colour in the photograph. A block appears with its swatch, labelled Point 1.
  3. Move its Hue (in degrees, all the way round), Saturation or Luminance (−100 to +100). Nothing changes on the frame until you move one of the three.

Range (0 to 100, starting at 50) is how far from the sampled colour the adjustment reaches: 0 reaches nothing, 100 reaches every colour the frame holds, and it fades in smoothly between. Up to eight points per frame, each with its own remove button, and Sample another adds the next. Unlike the bands, a point can be aimed at a grey or a shadow, so clicking a shadow to lift it works.

A point is aimed at the colour as it stands before the bands move it, so dragging the Blue band afterwards does not slide your point off the pixels you sampled.

This section has an eye, so you can see the frame with and without the whole colour edit.