Before you chase a reference still from a film
Colorists on a timeline grade under controlled monitors. You are on a laptop under daylight leaking through blinds. Expect the same numbers to feel different tomorrow morning.
Still, the sequence matters. Fix exposure first with brightness and contrast or exposure tools so clipping is intentional. Then open shadows versus highlights here. Reserve heavy stylized hue moves for hue and saturation once neutrals sit where you want them.
Example: sodium street lamp spill
Shadows pick up yellow orange. A small yellow toward blue nudge in the shadow rail pulls pavement back toward neutral without icing out skin midtones.
Example: snow under cloud
Highlights read blue gray. A slight move on the yellow versus blue rail toward yellow warms the snow while a separate midtone tweak keeps jacket fabric from going muddy.
What the preview is actually blending
Each pixel gets a luminance estimate from standard Rec. 709 style weights on red, green, blue. Low luminance pixels lean on your shadow settings, mid luminance on midtone, high on highlights, with crossfade weights so bands do not create hard lines.
Opposing pairs apply as channel offsets scaled by those weights. This is an approximation of classic lift gamma gain thinking, not a full ACES pipeline, which is why print proofing still belongs in desktop apps with ICC profiles.
Hard stops worth reading once
Indexed color PNGs, some CMYK JPEGs, or enormous raw files may choke mobile browsers. If the tab freezes, resize the source to under twelve megapixels offline, then retry.
Export is PNG from the balanced canvas. Alpha channels pass through. Animated GIF only shows the first frame if the browser decodes static pixels.
Nothing uploads to Toolexe. The tradeoff is zero server side backup: refresh clears the session.
