Portrait Color Grade Presets

Six presets, when to use each

• Natural Skin: Gentle warmth, protected highlights. The default for LinkedIn, corporate, and headshots that need to look like the person without an obvious filter look.
• Cinematic Teal: Teal shadows, golden highlights — the look every Hollywood blockbuster shares since the mid-2000s. Great for creative-industry profiles or personal-brand photography.
• Warm Sunset: Golden-hour warmth across the entire tone range, with a slight reddish push on highlights. Good for lifestyle / outdoors / hospitality photos.
• Moody: Deep shadows, muted saturation, gentle desaturated midtones. Editorial, fashion, or “quiet luxury” brand feel.
• Film Emulation: Lifted blacks, slight cyan in shadows, warm midtones. The 35 mm portrait-film look (Portra 400, Ektar) — works well for wedding, lifestyle, and personal photos.
• Editorial Mono: Full black and white with a subtle warm split tone in highlights and a cool shadow tint. Strong, simple, doesn't age. Common in author photos and senior-leadership headshots.

Why these vs. random Instagram filters

The difference between a portrait grade and a generic filter is the curves protect skin tones. A flat colour wash desaturates everything equally and skin ends up looking grey or alien. The presets here are anchored on tone curves that bend the highlights toward the look without compressing the midtone range where skin lives — so the colour shift is real, but the face still reads as the face.

How to use these with the AI Studio

The AI Studio outputs already-graded headshots in 100+ styles, so most users won't need this tool on Studio output. But: if you generate a corporate headshot and want to repurpose it as a warmer, more personal photo for a different platform, grade it here instead of generating a second batch. Same face, different look, zero credits used.