Auto-Grade: 20+ Cinematic Looks From a Single Word
Type "cinematic", "golden hour" or "moody noir" and get a grounded colour grade. How a vibe maps to brightness/contrast/temperature deltas — and why the recipe adapts to your image.
Colour grading is where a photo goes from "fine" to "intentional." But most people do not think in terms of lift the shadows 12, drop saturation 10, cool the temperature 8 — they think "make it cinematic." Auto-grade bridges that gap: you describe the mood, and the tool translates it into concrete adjustments.
A vibe is a recipe
Behind each named look is a recipe — a small set of deltas applied to the image:
- Cinematic — slightly darker, more contrast, desaturated a touch, cooler, with lifted shadows and pulled-down highlights. That teal-shadow / warm-skin separation is the "movie" feel.
- Golden hour — warmer temperature, gentle contrast, a little more saturation, lifted shadows.
- Moody noir — heavy contrast, near-monochrome, crushed everything.
- High-key — bright, low-contrast, airy.
- Cyberpunk — punchy saturation, cool cast, a magenta tint.
There are over twenty of these now, spanning warm/cold, summer/autumn, matte, pastel, vintage film, Wes-Anderson, and more.
Matching words to looks
You should not have to type the exact preset name. Auto-grade normalises your phrase and matches it a few ways:
- Direct match — "cinematic" hits the cinematic recipe.
- Substring — "make it cinematic please" still matches.
- Keyword routing — "sunset glow" routes to golden hour, "synthwave" to cyberpunk, "washed out" to high-key.
If nothing matches, you get a gentle neutral grade plus a nudge toward vibes that do exist — never a silent no-op.
Why grounding in the image matters
The same recipe should not hit every photo identically. A "cinematic" grade on a bright daylight portrait needs less shadow-lift than one on an already-dark interior. A good auto-grade reads the image's exposure and tunes the recipe to it, so the look is consistent even when the numbers differ shot to shot.
Using it well
- Start with a vibe, then fine-tune. Auto-grade gets you 80% there; nudge individual sliders for the last 20%.
- It is non-destructive. The grade is a live setting, not baked pixels, so you can undo it in one step or switch vibes freely.
- Be consistent across a set. For a product line or a photo series, apply the same vibe to every shot so they read as a collection.
The point is not to replace a colourist — it is to give everyone a fast, repeatable starting point that already looks deliberate.