Color Grading Overview

The Color Workspace in Oraphim is a Hollywood-caliber, 32-bit floating-point color grading environment. It is designed to take raw, uncalibrated footage from any digital cinema camera and transform it into a polished, cinematic final image.

Unlike simple photo-editing sliders, the Color Workspace uses a sophisticated node-based architecture specifically optimized for moving images, tracked masks, and complex color space transformations.

The Color Pipeline

Professional color grading is not just about making an image look "pretty." It is a structured, multi-step pipeline. We strongly recommend progressing through these concepts sequentially:

  1. Color Management: Before you touch a single dial, you must tell Oraphim what camera you shot on and what screen you are mastering for. If your color management is wrong, your entire grade is broken.
  2. Nodes: The structural foundation of how color effects are layered and processed.
  3. Primary Grading: Balancing the image. Fixing exposure, correcting white balance, and matching different camera angles so they look cohesive.
  4. Secondary Grading: Stylizing the image. Isolating a red shirt to make it pop, or tracking a window over an actor's face to brighten it without affecting the background.
  5. Delivery Spaces: Ensuring your final grade looks correct on YouTube, Netflix, or a cinema projector.

The Interface

When you open the Color Workspace, the interface is divided into several key zones:

  • The Viewer (Top Center): Displays your current clip.
  • The Gallery (Top Left): A place to save "Looks" (stills of graded frames) so you can easily apply the exact same grade to another clip later.
  • The Node Graph (Top Right): The flowchart where you build your grading tree.
  • The Mini Timeline (Center): A visual representation of the edits you made in the Edit Workspace. You click clips here to grade them individually.
  • The Color Palettes (Bottom Left): The primary tools—Color Wheels, RGB Mixer, and Curves.
  • The Scopes (Bottom Right): Mathematical graphs that represent the color data. You must rely on these, not just your eyes.