Colour & mood

What this group is for

Colour is memory. A scene graded toward sepia reads as the past; a duotone poster reads as design; a thermal wash reads as the machine’s point of view. This group is where the frame stops being a recording and starts being a decision — a palette someone picked on purpose, with a mood attached.

Reach for it when the look has to carry feeling on its own: title sequences, music videos, branded loops, the flashback that needs to feel older than the rest of the cut. Anyone chasing a signature colour — not a correction, a statement — lives here.

The effects

Written up in full: palette-quantize · halftone-dots — sample frame, parameter table and a downloadable project each.

• rgb-shift — Chromatic aberration that pulls red left and blue right, the edge of a lens about to fail. Good for tension, cheap-camera grit, and the queasy fringe of a bad signal.
• noise — Random character and colour replacement scattered across the frame. Good for analogue decay, snow on a dead channel, and roughing up a look that feels too clean.
• invert — Blends the image toward its inverted colour. Good for X-ray dread, the negative-world cutaway, and a hard tonal flip that still keeps the form.
• hue-drift — Rotates hue through HSL over time — globally, per-row or per-column. Good for slow psychedelic shifts and the colour that won’t hold still under fever.
• channel-crush — Applies per-channel bias plus quantisation, bending the colour cast and stepping it down. Good for sickly grades, broken film stock, and a palette pushed past comfort.
• solarize — Partially inverts tones above or below a threshold, the darkroom accident made deliberate. Good for art-house portraits and a luminous, slightly wrong highlight.
• duotone — Maps luminance onto a two-colour gradient. Good for poster art, brand lock-ups, and the instantly recognisable two-ink look.
• tritone — Remaps the image into three colour zones across shadow, mid and highlight. Good for editorial covers and a richer graphic grade than two inks allow.
• palette-quantize — Snaps colours to ANSI, Amber, Green, CGA, Game Boy or Silver Screen. Good for hardware nostalgia — the exact phosphor of a remembered machine.
• palette-cycle — Palette-quantize that auto-cycles through the selected palettes on a timer, with optional crossfade. Good for living title backgrounds and loops that should never settle on one era.
• posterize — Quantises luminance into N levels, flattening tone into bands. Good for screen-print energy and a bold, reduced poster feel.
• highlight-sheen — Sends a travelling bright band across the highlights. Good for product gloss, the catch-light sweep, and a frame that should look freshly polished.
• desync-palette — Drives character index and colour from different luminance, so glyph and tint disagree on purpose. Good for an off-kilter, dissonant look that reads as unease.
• iridescent-remap — An oil-slick / petro-aqua remap where luminance, position and time drive an iridescent palette that flows over the image with a darker-darks falloff. Good for liquid, otherworldly grades and surfaces that look like spilled fuel in light.
• magic-ball — An iridescent volumetric sphere at a point: a fake-volume raymarch of 3D noise picks ASCII density, a three-sinusoid phase drives the rainbow and fresnel softens the rim. Good for a hypnotic centrepiece — a crystal ball, a sci-fi orb, a focal hallucination.
• thermal-vision — Remaps luminance to a thermal palette running black → blue → green → yellow → red → white. Good for predator-cam point-of-view and any “the machine sees heat” beat.
• old-photo — A vintage finish: sepia tint, vignette, animated scratches and dust, plus an extra corner fade. Good for the flashback, the found-footage memory, and a frame that should feel decades old.

How to reach for it

You’ll find these in the editor’s effect picker under the Colour & mood group, stackable on any clip in the order you choose. Any effect here can be gated by a mask layer, so the grade lands only where you paint it — one face, one object, a single quadrant of the frame.