Looks

A Look captures the complete state of your inspector grade — every Corrections, Film Emulation, and Color Management adjustment, plus your Layers stack — as a single, reusable file. Looks are designed for three things: re-applying a grade to other clips with one click, building a personal library of starting points, and sharing grades with collaborators or clients.

Looks are new in Color Finale 2.15 and are accessed from the Looks button in the inspector.

Looks vs. Presets

Color Finale has two complementary preset systems. They serve different purposes:

Presets are still the right tool for modular grading building blocks — see Presets and LUTs and Presets. Use Looks when you want the entire inspector state captured and recalled as one unit.

Applying a Look

Click the Looks button in the inspector to open the Looks window. Each Look is shown as a 16:9 thumbnail rendered from a representative frame. Browse by category, hover for the Look’s name and author, and click to apply.

Applying a Look replaces all sections it contains. Sections the Look does not specify are left unchanged on the clip. This means a Look can ship as a “complete grade” (everything specified) or as a “partial recipe” (e.g. only film grain + halation, leaving your Corrections alone).

Apply Optional Sections

Some Looks include sections you may not want to apply on every clip — for example, a Look might include both a creative grade and a Color Management setup. The Apply sheet lets you tick which sections to apply and which to leave alone. Useful when:

• The Look was authored on a different camera and you want to keep your own ACES IDT.
• You want the color of a Look but not its Layers stack (or vice versa).
• You want to audition just the Film Look from a complete grade.

Per-Layer Bypass States

Looks remember which inspector layers were bypassed when the Look was saved. If a Look was saved with Halation on but Bloom bypassed, applying the Look reproduces that exact arrangement — bypass states travel with the Look.

Saving a Look

With the inspector configured the way you want, click Save Look from the Looks window’s gear menu (or the Looks button’s contextual menu). The Save sheet asks for:

• Name — required. The display name shown in the Looks window.
• Category — optional. Used to group Looks in the browser. Common categories: Film, Natural, Creative, BW. You can pick from existing categories or type a new one.
• Author — optional. Useful when sharing.
• Description — optional. A one-line note about what the Look is for.

A thumbnail is captured automatically from the current frame at 16:9. You don’t need to scrub to a “good frame” first — Color Finale picks one that represents the grade well. If your frame is unusually large, the thumbnail capture handles it without artifacts.

The saved Look appears immediately in the Looks window under its category.

Managing Looks

From the Looks window’s contextual menu you can:

• Rename a Look or change its category and metadata.
• Move a Look to a different category.
• Delete a Look.
• Reveal in Finder to locate the underlying .cflook file.

Exporting and Sharing

Looks are stored as .cflook files — a human-readable JSON format. To share a Look, choose Export as Look… from the contextual menu and save the .cflook somewhere your collaborator can reach (email, cloud storage, project folder).

To use a shared Look, double-click the .cflook to import it into your library, or drop it onto the Looks window.

Because the format is JSON, advanced users and tool authors can hand-edit .cflook files or generate them programmatically. The full format is documented in the Look Format Specification (Docs/LookFormat_Spec.md in the source distribution).

What a Look Captures

A Look can capture any combination of:

• Color Management — input transform, ACES IDT/ODT, working space, input LUT, Film Look stock
• Corrections — exposure, contrast/pivot, white balance (temperature, tint), saturation, sharpness
• Film Emulation — subtractive grading, halation, bloom, vignette, film grain, film saturation
• Layers stack — every layer in the panel, with its parameters, masks, and bypass state

Sections not present in the file are skipped on apply, so authors can ship narrow Looks (just a film stock and grain recipe) or sweeping Looks (a complete grade including ACES setup).

Tips

• Build a personal library of “starting point” Looks for the kinds of projects you do most often (interviews, narrative day-exterior, music video, etc.). Apply, then refine per shot.
• When sharing a Look that depends on ACES, mention the source camera in the description. The recipient can use Apply Optional Sections to skip the ACES IDT if their footage is from a different camera.
• A Look saved in a 2.15 project will open in any 2.15 (or later) installation. The format is versioned, so older Color Finale builds will refuse to import newer Looks rather than risk a wrong result.