Adobe Lightroom vs Color.io
Adobe Lightroom is a fantastic general purpose photo editor but its color grading features are a bit underwhelming. Color.io is a powerful online raw image editor that brings advanced color grading and film emulation tools to digital photography.
Photographers need the ability to create stunningly realistic and rich tones that truly elevate an image without looking artificial. Color.io uses cinema grade color science and powerful gamut stabilisers to achieve a color rendering that is unmatched by any other tool on the market.
Color Match uses AI to extract the color, contrast and brightness from reference images. Designed for photographers, Color.io enables pro-grade color matching for photography and exports Lightroom XMP Profiles.
Intuitive color curves driven by world-class analog color modeling enable color depth and precision far beyond Lightroom’s straight-line adjustments.
Color.io comes with proprietary color refraction wheels that allow you to shift and compress colors with much higher color stability than the HSL tool in Lightroom.
The Color.io Preset Library brings you hundreds of installable film emulations. From Kodak Vision3 200T, 500T, and 250D to Portra 400 and CineStill 800T, Color.io presets add true analog behavior to your photos. While Lightroom’s presets excel at quick tonal adjustments, Color.io models the chemical and optical response of real film, giving you subtler grain, authentic halation, and non-linear color curves. Every preset in Color.io is fully editable so you can fine-tune curves, density, and vibrance - then export your custom look as a Lightroom profile to keep your end-to-end workflow smooth and consistent.
Apply film looks with built-in and custom presets. Get started with hundreds of built-in film emulations and generate film presets with Spectra AI model.
Edit fearlessly with a seekable undo history and persistent snapshots. Experiment, compare, and branch edits with versioned control over every grade.
Grade with precision using histograms, waveforms, vectorscopes, and masks. Analyze exposure, color balance, and skin tones with live, movable scopes.
Shape image brightness with a multi-point exposure curve. Brighten shadows, dim highlights, and freely distribute brightness across your images with precision.
Crop and rotate with control in a full-screen transform mode. From freeform crop to filmic aspect ratios, adjust with real-time previews and intuitive keyboard gestures.
Fine-tune exposure and color with dual-axis controls. Adjust brightness, saturation, temperature, and tint interactively, with precise feedback and fast resets.
Exceptional color (and texture) emulation.
Every control in Color.io is driven by an engine that models the complex, non-linear response behaviours of analog film. This allows photographers to easily bring out dense, painterly colors from their images with best-in-class cinema color science, a huge preset library and powerful color transformation tools that enable color grading images unlike ever before.
Film-like RAW.
Raw development in Color.io is powered by VisionLog - an ultra-wide-gamut, log-encoded color space compatible with built-in ACES © color managed. The VisionLog curve has a wider dynamic range than a standard linear encoding, which means that it can capture all detail in both the highlights and shadows of an image - a perfect starting point for grading.
Real Film Halation.
Color.io comes with optical film halation simulation that recreates the effect of very bright light causing orange-red highlight flaring on analog film. It's an important characteristic of many film stocks that can not be created through color grading alone.
Lightroom Profiles.
Open Color.io from within Lightroom via "Edit in" and export XMP profiles and 3D LUTs.
Batch Editing.
Grade hundreds of images at the same time. Multiple documents, batch export - you got it!
Rather than overlaying grain textures like most other software, Color.io deconstructs your image and rebuilds it pixel-by-pixel using synthetically generated film grain. This results in an incredibly organic look because the underlying pixel structure of digital images is entirely reconstructed to match the grain distribution, density, rotation, size, and color gradation of real film.
Realistic Grain.
Color.io runs in your browser and as an app on (almost) all desktop and mobile devices. Jump right in and get creative with free access to all tools or upgrade to an affordable Pro plan - available as a one-time purchase or an affordable subscription - whatever you prefer!
Color.io delivers a raw editing and color-grading experience tailored to creative workflows, with:
Together, these focused color and film emulation tools help you dial in your look faster and more precisely than a generalist RAW editor.
Color.io is designed to integrate seamlessly into your Lightroom and mixed-media workflows:
This two-way compatibility means you can leverage Color.io’s film-centric tools without disrupting your Lightroom catalog.
Lightroom is great for cataloging and giving you a decent color starting point; Color.io gives you Resolve-like color grading tools that model film behavior:
Together, the extensive color and texture tools in Color.io let you recreate not just the look, but the light-reactive behavior of real film stocks.
Once you’ve defined your style - absolutely:
Many users report cutting their raw grading time in half compared to Lightroom alone.