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An effect changes how a picture looks, not what it is. The file stays untouched, so you can soften the effect, animate it or take it off later. Eighteen effects, sixteen color looks and four LUT paths, each on one media layer and all still editable.

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Ask for a look

Say what it should feel like; you don’t need the effect names:
Works the same in the Studio app and with your own agent. To copy a look from a video you like, add it as a reference and say “grade it like this”.

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The effects

  • Essentials: Blur, Pixelate, Bloom. Hide something, pull focus, make highlights glow.
  • Retro and glitch: Tape Damage, Film Artifacts, Scanlines, CRT Curvature, Channel Separation, Digital Glitch, Chroma Softening. Old tape, old film, old monitors, broken signals, with real tracking wobble and color bleed.
  • Print: Halftone, Two-Ink Print, Ordered Dither, Mono Screen.
  • Art: ASCII (eight styles), Engraving, Crosshatch, Kuwahara Paint.
One presenter frame shown as the original, pixelated, two-ink print, and ASCII treatments

One source, four finishes: original, pixelated, two-ink print, and ASCII.

Commit to a strong look or leave it off: a half-strength ASCII reads as a mistake. For grain and vignette, use the color controls below; for HUDs, light leaks and flashes, use a Catalog overlay.

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Fix and grade the color

Correct first (exposure, white balance, contrast, saturation), then style. No look rescues blown highlights or the wrong shot.
The same presenter frame before and after a restrained natural portrait grade

The same source before and after a restrained natural-portrait grade.

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Adjust it by hand

In the browser editor, select an image or video and open Effects or Grade in the Inspector. Grade starts with thirteen presets, each previewed on your own frame, and a Strength slider. Hold the compare button to flash back to the original, and scrub a few places in moving footage: a grade that flatters one frame can ruin the next. The scopes measure the picture so you aren’t judging by your screen: the histogram shows lost detail at either end, the waveform shows where across the frame, the RGB parade names a color cast, and the vectorscope puts skin tones on one known line. Copy grade to reuses a grade on other clips, as a starting point; the same numbers rarely suit two shots.

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LUTs

A LUT (a .cube file, up to 64 points per side) maps every color to another, blended in at the strength you set. Use creative Rec.709 LUTs. HyperFrames doesn’t convert camera LOG footage first, so a LOG clip needs its camera’s own transform or comes out wrong.

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Limits

  • An effect or grade covers the whole layer. It doesn’t follow a face or an object: to treat part of the frame, put that part on its own layer.
  • It applies to images, video and canvas, not to text or HTML.
  • Standard video only. HDR sources preview in SDR and the effects don’t carry into true HDR.
  • Blur, Bloom and Kuwahara Paint are slow; several stacked on big layers slow preview and render.
  • Keep media inside the project. A file on another server needs the right CORS headers and can vanish before render.
List what exists, measure a source, then apply. --dry-run shows the change, --clear removes it.
Compare several looks on one frame (up to sixteen, the original first):
Phone photos keep their displayed orientation and aspect ratio in the sheet; the source image stays unchanged.Everything lands in data-color-grading, in named sections: adjust for corrections, details for grain and vignette, effects for treatments. A flat object such as {"exposure":0.15} renders nothing, and npx hyperframes lint says which section it belongs in.
The full format is in the HTML schema and the color grading reference.