Colour grade

Order of operations: balance, then match, then look, then finishing. A look applied before balance is why "cinematic" presets look wrong on real footage.

Workflow

1. Inspect exposure, balance and any reference before choosing changes (source_inspect, measured scene evidence; on MCP analyze_shots returns a colourReadout with clipped and crushed percentages, casts and face brightness per shot). Do not describe unseen skin as corrected.
2. Correct per shot. Mismatched clips are corrected individually with setColor: white balance with temperature and tint, then exposure, contrast, saturation. Match to the BEST shot, not the average. A global filter cannot fix opposite errors across shots.
3. One shared look, optional. An addAdjustmentLayer across the timeline, graded with setColor, renders only brightness, exposure, contrast, saturation, hue, highlights, shadows, blur, sharpen and vignette; its opacity acts as strength. Use it for the shared tonal look. Colour in the look (a teal-orange split, warmth, a LUT) renders only on the clips themselves: give each clip the same lift / gamma / gain values with setColor, or applyFilterPreset on each clip.
4. Protect skin and product identity. Put a colour split in lift (weighted to the shadows) and gain (weighted to the highlights), which leaves midtone skin mostly alone. Prefer vibrance over saturation when a shot is dull but faces already read well. If skin still drifts, the clip's qualifier corrects one colour range (see Gotchas).
5. Verify the rendered result with preview frames at several points: no clipping, skin natural, no visible camera change across cuts.

Gotchas