Color

Color refers to hue and saturation — the chromatic content of pixels, separately from their brightness. The Color group covers the three knobs that shape AgX's chromatic response: white balance (the global cast), HSL (per-color-band edits), and color grading (three-way wheels for tonal regions).

White balance

Corrects (or creatively shifts) the color cast of a scene. AgX exposes two parameters:

• Temperature — shifts the image along the blue-yellow axis, undoing the warm cast of incandescent lighting or the cool cast of overcast daylight.
• Tint — shifts along the green-magenta axis, useful for fluorescent and mixed-lighting scenes.

White balance runs in linear-light RGB because color casts are physical properties of the light source.

Color temperature

Background concept. Photographers describe the color of light in Kelvin. Lower temperatures are warmer (orange/red, ~2700K candle, ~3200K tungsten), higher temperatures are cooler (blue, ~6500K daylight, ~10000K shade). Cameras and editors that "set" a white-balance temperature in Kelvin interpret that as the source-light temperature and shift the image to neutralise its cast.

AgX's temperature slider is not a Kelvin value. It is a creative warm-cool slider: positive values warm the image (boost red, reduce blue), negative values cool it. The mapping is dimensionless — the slider controls a relative channel-multiplier shift, not a Kelvin delta. Use the slider with the photographer's intuition above as a guide, but read the on-screen result rather than expecting a specific Kelvin source-temperature interpretation.

HSL

Per-color-band adjustments to hue, saturation, and luminance. AgX divides the color wheel into eight bands (red, orange, yellow, green, aqua, blue, purple, magenta) and lets you shift each band's hue (push reds toward orange), modify its saturation (mute blues), or lift/lower its brightness (darken yellows). HSL is the right tool when one color needs different treatment than the others.

Color grading

Three-way color grading distributes color shifts across tonal regions: shadows get one color, midtones another, highlights a third, with an optional global wheel layered on top. The "blue shadows + orange highlights" cinematic look is the canonical use; AgX also exposes a balance control to bias the regions.

Color grading sits in RGB (gamma Rec.2020) and uses luminance to weight the regions.

See: Basic adjustments (white balance section), HSL, and Color grading for the algorithm-level math behind these knobs.

LUTs also produce color transforms; AgX applies them as part of the color stage. See LUT format for what a LUT is and how AgX handles it.