realistic-color-grade

Colour realism with ai_realism

ai_realism is the look for "make the colours more realistic". It runs the three passes an editor does by hand on footage that looks too clean, too saturated or too glossy — typically AI-generated video:

1. A gentle grade over the whole frame — contrast, highlights and saturation pulled down slightly, plus an optional white-balance nudge.
2. A shine correction on skin — the skin's own hue is sampled every frame inside the portrait segmenter's skin matte, only bright skin is keyed, and its saturation, lightness and contrast come down, so the plastic, over-lit look goes. White shirts and warm walls are left alone.
3. Light colour grain over the whole frame, as a camera sensor's.

Every pass is subtle on purpose. If the change is visible at a glance, it is too strong.

When it fits

• Generated or heavily processed footage: waxy or glossy skin, punchy saturation, crushed highlights, no noise at all.
• A request phrased as "more realistic", "more natural", "less AI", "like it was shot on a camera", "less plastic".

Not the tool for:

• A stylised grade ("cinematic", "vintage", "teal and orange"). Use a LUT grade effect or a look such as duotone; picsart_scene_capabilities lists them.
• Footage that already looks natural. The grade and the grain add little and can flatten it.
• A fix for one colour only (an over-saturated sky). Use hsl_secondary directly, keyed on that colour.

Apply it

Put the look on the media layer itself (an image or video layer), in reference mode, with the values chosen for this video:

picsart_scene_apply_preset({
  "scene": ..., "layerId": "clip", "preset": "look:ai_realism", "mode": "reference",
  "params": { "strength": 1, "skin": 1, "grain": 0.06 }
})

Anything left out takes the look's default. picsart_scene_capabilities({ sections: ["look:ai_realism"] }) returns every parameter with its range.

Choose the values for this video

Look at the footage first: picsart_media_probe for its resolution, and picsart_scene_contact_sheet with times: [t1, t2, …] and resolution set to the scene's composition.width and composition.height to see the colour cast, how much skin shine there is and whether it already has noise.

Parameter	Default	Change it when
strength	1	The grade: highlights and saturation down, contrast barely, so blacks stay deep. Lower (0.4–0.7) for footage that is already soft or low in contrast; 0 skips it.
temperature	0	Negative (to about -0.3) to cool an orange, over-warm render; positive to warm a cold, blue one. Applies even at strength 0.
skin	1	The shine correction: bright skin's lightness and saturation down, its texture kept. 1 for glossy AI skin, about 0.5 for a light touch, 0 when nobody is in frame or the skin is already matte. In a dark scene it reaches only the brightest skin, as it should.
skinHue	20	Rarely. The skin's hue is sampled every frame; this is only the fallback when too little skin is visible to sample.
skinHueRange	25	Widen (30–40) when part of the shine stays; narrow (15–20) when lips or a warm background change too.
grain	0.08	0.05–0.1 is felt rather than seen; from about 0.12 it shows on flat dark areas such as a night sky. Lower for a low-resolution source that will be scaled up (grain is per pixel, so it grows with the scale) and for footage with noise of its own; 0 for none.

Everything else is fixed inside the look (which tones count as shine, how much the key is softened). For control over those, see the last section.

Traps

• The skin pass needs a person in frame. With nobody segmented it does nothing, so footage without people gets the grade and the grain only.
• The layer must render its own media. If the host layer also carries effects, or is a scene_ref, its source is drawn as a nested composition, which is never segmented, so the shine correction is skipped. Keep the host's own effects empty, and put any other effect on an adjustment layer above it.
• It is a static look. In a layer's looks, list it before any look that moves or pads its subject, or validation refuses the order.

Check the result

Render the same moments with and without the look, each with picsart_scene_contact_sheet with times: [t1, t2, …] and resolution set to the scene's composition.width and composition.height, using a frame where a face is large. Then check:

• skin shine is calmer but skin still reads as skin, not grey;
• white clothes, teeth, eyes and warm backgrounds are unchanged;
• the grain is barely visible at full size and does not shimmer as blocks;
• the whole frame has not gone flat. If it has, lower strength.

Beyond the six parameters

The look expands to three effects on the media layer, in order: adjust (the grade), hsl_secondary (the shine key and its correction) and film_grain (with color 1). To tune what the look fixes — which brightness counts as shine, the key's blur, the grade's balance of contrast and highlights — detach it with picsart_scene_resolve_looks, or picsart_scene_apply_preset with mode: "expand", and edit those effects. Their parameters are in picsart_scene_capabilities. Each works alone too: film_grain with color 1 for grain only, hsl_secondary for any one colour.