LuttieColor Wheels — 3-Way Color Grading in Your Browser
The 3-way color wheel is the cornerstone of professional color grading. Luttie gives you independent shadow, midtone, and highlight wheels — the same pipeline found in DaVinci Resolve, Premiere Pro, and Final Cut Pro — running entirely in your browser. Grade log footage, create cinematic looks, and export your grade as a .cube LUT in minutes.
Three wheels, complete tonal control.
Shadows
Push the darkest tones toward a specific hue. Adding blue to shadows creates a cooler, cinematic contrast against warm highlights.
Midtones
The most impactful wheel for overall image feel. Midtones carry skin tones, background detail, and the majority of your image content.
Highlights
Shift the brightest parts of the image. Warm highlights with orange tones create a sunset feel; cool highlights add a clinical, airy quality.
What color wheels are best for.
Log footage conversion
Flat, low-contrast log footage (S-Log3, D-Log M, V-Log) needs its tonal range expanded. Color wheels let you quickly set the correct shadow lift and highlight rolloff before fine-tuning with curves.
Cinematic teal-orange grade
The classic Hollywood look comes from opposing color temperatures: push shadows toward teal (blue-green) and highlights toward orange. Three-way wheels make this a matter of minutes.
Day-for-night correction
Use the shadows wheel to push dark tones toward blue, reduce highlight brightness with the highlights wheel, and desaturate midtones to simulate a moonlit night look.
Complementary to curves
Color wheels are great for broad strokes — setting the overall character of a grade. Combine them with RGB curves when you need precise tonal targeting within a specific range.
Frequently asked questions
What are color wheels in color grading?
Color wheels (also called a 3-way color corrector) are circular controls that let you push the hue of a specific tonal range — shadows, midtones, or highlights — in any direction. The wheel's center is neutral; dragging the puck toward an edge adds that color to the selected tonal zone. Most professional NLEs (DaVinci Resolve, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro) include 3-way color wheels as a core tool. Luttie brings the same workflow to your browser.
What's the difference between color wheels and curves?
Both tools adjust color and tone, but they operate differently. Color wheels give you direct, intuitive control over three broad tonal zones (shadows, midtones, highlights) — great for setting the overall look and feel of a grade quickly. RGB curves give you point-by-point control over the full tonal range of each channel — ideal for precise corrections and complex multi-point grades. The two tools complement each other: use wheels for character, curves for precision.
Can I use color wheels on flat/log footage?
Yes, and it's one of the most common use cases. Log footage (S-Log3, D-Log M, V-Log, C-Log) is intentionally flat and low-contrast so it retains maximum detail. Color wheels are the right tool to expand that tonal range back out — use the shadows wheel to deepen the blacks, the highlights wheel to bring up the whites, and the midtones wheel to set the overall color balance. Combine with a LUT preset for camera-specific correction.
Grade shadows, midtones, and highlights — free.
Professional 3-way color wheels in your browser. No download.
Open the color wheels tool