Brightness, contrast, saturation and hue

The Color section makes broad changes to the whole picture: brighter, punchier, more or less colourful, or every colour turned around the wheel.

Where: Clip tab ▸ Color ▸ Color
Agent tools: set_videoset_action_end

The Color section

Select the clip and open the Color sub-tab.
Open the Color section by clicking its header. It starts closed.
Drag a slider, or type in the number field beside it.

All four controls start at 0.

Control	Range	Shows	What it does
Brightness	−1 to +1	Two decimals	Raises or lowers every level
Contrast	−1 to +1	Two decimals	Spreads the tones apart or pulls them together
Saturation	−1 to +1	Two decimals	More or less colour overall
Hue	−180° to +180°	Whole degrees	Turns every colour around the colour wheel

Reset in the header clears these four as one undo step, Undo Color, and leaves Light alone. The header reads “neutral” or “adjusted”.

With an action selected, every control here sets the value the action animates to, rather than the clip’s own value.

Brightness

Brightness adds the same amount to every level, so the blacks rise or fall with everything else. Use it for an overall lift of the whole picture. Frame Job has no Offset wheel, so this is the control for that job.

To brighten the way a camera would, with black staying black, use Exposure.

Contrast

Contrast spreads the tones away from the middle or pulls them toward it. At +1 the spread doubles. At −1 every tone meets at mid-grey.

For finer control over which tones move, use the curves.

Saturation

Saturation gives more or less colour across the whole picture. −1 is greyscale and +1 is twice the colour.

It moves every colour alike. To favour the muted colours and spare the strong ones, use Vibrance.

Hue

Hue turns every colour around the colour wheel by the same angle, from −180° to +180°. Its field shows whole degrees. Positive turns red toward yellow and then green.

Each pixel’s brightness is kept, and greys stay grey.

To turn one colour and leave the others alone, use Hue vs Hue.

With an agent

An agent sets these four in set_video’s color object, as brightness, contrast, saturation and hue, and set_action_end takes the same keys for an action. Any it doesn’t name keep their values, and 0 means no change.

An agent isn’t held to the sliders’ ranges for these four controls. set_video takes any finite number for them, with hue in degrees. Light’s controls are different: set_video won’t take a value outside their ranges. See Tools: picture and grade.

Good to know

A number you type outside a control’s range is pulled back to the nearest limit.
These four act first in the grade, before Light, even though the tab lists Light above them. See The fixed grade order.
A chroma key reads the picture before these controls, so changing them doesn’t move the key.
Blur and Sharpen act after these four. See Filters around the grade.
On an adjustment clip, these controls grade everything behind the clip.