Color grading & LUTs
Post-processing that sets the final look of the image: bloom and vignette, hue/saturation grading, and cinematic color LUTs (built-in or your own imported .cube / .3dl).
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Beyond lights and atmosphere, a scene has a final look, the screen-space pass applied after everything renders. It lives in Settings ▸ Viewport Feel ▸ Post-processing, alongside sun god rays & lens flare. A new scene starts with Bloom (0.35) and Vignette (0.45) on, and publishes them; depth of field, grading, LUT, glitch, grain, lens distortion, chromatic aberration, god rays and lens flare are off.
At the top of the section, Show effects in published scene decides whether visitors get this pass at all. The editor always shows the effects, so when the box is off a warning under it says that what you are looking at is not what a visitor will see. Sun rays, lens flare and the colour LUT are not behind the box: they publish either way. The weight meter follows the same rule, charging the gated effects only while the box is on. A scene from before the setting existed opens with it off (so its published look did not change under it); a new scene, and a copy made from a template, start with it on.
Tone mapping & exposure
Underneath all of it sits the tone mapping curve: how the renderer squeezes the scene's full brightness range into what a screen can actually show. Two controls in Settings ▸ Viewport Feel, just above Post-processing:
| Tone mapping | The curve |
|---|---|
| ACES Filmic | The default. A filmic roll-off that keeps bright areas from blowing out to flat white, the safe choice for almost every scene. |
| AgX | Blender's default curve. Bright, saturated colours roll toward white the way a camera sees them instead of skewing in hue, so a neon sign or a lit brand colour stays the colour it is. |
| Neutral (Khronos PBR) | Built for product shots: colours below the highlights come through almost exactly as authored, so a client's brand red or a material sample matches its swatch. Only the brightest parts are compressed. |
| Cineon | A film-print curve. Slightly lifted blacks and a softer shoulder than ACES. |
| Reinhard | A gentle, even compression. Nothing clips, but strong colors desaturate as they brighten. |
| Linear | No curve at all: just exposure, then a hard clip at white. Punchy, and easy to blow out. |
| None | Colors pass through untouched. Exposure has no effect in this mode. |
Exposure (0.1–4, default 1) is a single brightness multiplier feeding that curve, the fastest way to lift a scene that lit correctly but reads dark, without touching a single light. It applies once, on whichever path is rendering, so it never doubles up when post-processing is on.
Bloom's threshold is read before exposure. Bloom picks the bright parts of the image before the tone curve and its exposure are applied, so raising Exposure brightens the glow that is already there but does not make more of the frame bloom; lower Bloom threshold for that.
Both settings are part of the base render rather than an effect, so they always travel to your published scene: the "Show effects in published scene" toggle below doesn't gate them. The Color grading sliders and the LUT are both applied after tone mapping, so the curve is what the grade sees.
Publishing the look
One master toggle (Show effects in published scene) decides whether visitors see your post-processing. When it's on (the default for new scenes), the published scene matches your editor: bloom, vignette, depth of field, glitch, grain, lens distortion, chromatic aberration, and hue/saturation grading all travel. Turn it off and the published scene renders plain while you keep the effects in the editor. Sun rays, lens flare, and the Color LUT publish regardless of this toggle: they're treated as part of the scene's intended look.
The low tier renders plain. With Render quality on Auto, a visitor on a low-tier device (a weak phone GPU, 2 GB of memory or less, or a device that already lost its graphics on this scene) gets the scene without the post-processing look and without sun rays or lens flare; the LUT stays. A slow connection does not count against the look: it lowers the resolution and texture sizes, not the effects. To give every visitor the effects, pin Render quality to High (a device that has already lost its graphics still drops to low).
The editor has no matching switch: it shows the effects either way. So while the toggle is off, what you are looking at is not what a visitor sees, and the checkbox says so in a warning line underneath itself. A scene cloned from a template arrives with the toggle on, so your first published page matches the one you built.
Lens effects
Two of the toggles imitate what happens in the glass, before an image ever reaches a sensor. Used gently they read as a real camera; pushed hard they read as a stylistic effect, which is also a legitimate choice.
Lens distortion bends the frame the way a wide or cheap lens does. Distortion strength (0.05 to 1.5) pushes the image outward from the center: low values give a subtle bulge, high values a fisheye. The frame is zoomed back as it bends so the corners never sample past the edge.
Chromatic aberration splits red and blue apart. A lens cannot bend every wavelength by the same amount, so one point of white light lands as several colored points instead of one, leaving colored edges on high-contrast boundaries. Two controls:
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Color split | How far apart the channels are pulled, 0.0002 to 0.01 (default 0.0018, which is 0.32% of the screen's height). Up to about 0.002 it reads as a lens. Above that the split is wider than a thin stroke, and a stroke in one pure channel (pure red, green or blue lettering) renders black: its only channel is moved off it and nothing is left behind. The Assistant and the MCP warn when a published scene goes over it. |
| Strongest at the edges | On by default, and the setting that decides whether this looks like glass or like a filter. On, the split is zero at the center of the frame and widens toward the corners, which is what a real lens does. Off, the whole frame is split evenly, the flat look games and music videos use. |
It looks the same on every screen shape. The camera frames by the screen's height, so the split, the lens bend and where the edge fringe begins are all measured against the frame's height too, with a 16:9 desktop as the reference: a 16:9 window renders exactly as it always did, and an upright phone shows the same fringe on the same subject instead of a smaller one. On a window too small to show the split at all it is lifted to the smallest fringe that still reads as colour.
Both are full-screen passes that add to your scene weight: lens distortion 2 points, chromatic aberration 8, against 1 for a vignette and 2 for grain.
Color grading
Turn on Color grading for four quick sliders that shift the whole image: Hue, Saturation, Brightness, and Contrast. Good for a fast warm/cool nudge or dialling saturation up for a punchier look. Saturation and Contrast stop at plus or minus 0.95: at a full 1 the contrast curve divides by zero.
The grade runs after tone mapping, right beside the LUT, so it works on the finished on-screen colour. Earlier it ran on the raw HDR image before the curve, where a strong saturation or contrast setting could turn a bright glowing colour (red neon lettering, say) into black shapes on a real GPU. A scene that already uses grading needs nothing: it now simply renders the colour you picked.
Color LUT (cinematic looks)
A LUT (look-up table) remaps every color in the frame at once, the way a film grade does. Turn on Color LUT, pick a Look, and slide Intensity (0–1) to blend it against the ungraded image. The LUT is applied after tone mapping, so it's the very last thing that touches the picture. Built-in looks:
Import your own LUT
Have a grade from your own color workflow? Click Import LUT… and upload a .cube, .3dl (text LUTs up to 12 MB), or image LUT. It's stored in your Asset Library and appears under a My LUTs group in the Look dropdown; selecting it grades the scene and it publishes to visitors like the built-ins.
To get rid of one, pick it and click Delete LUT…: it asks first, because this deletes the LUT file from your library rather than merely deselecting it, and any other scene using that LUT loses it. Deleted LUTs land in the Asset Library's Trash tab, so they stay reclaimable.