Matching a reference

You have a still that looks the way you want: a frame from a film, a photograph, or a shot you already graded. Voxel grades your shot to match it, and you finish the match by talking.

How it works

1. Open your clip in Voxel and give Claude the reference still.
2. Ask for the match in your own words, for example "make this look like the reference".
3. Voxel compares your shot with the reference and describes the difference in words: warmer or cooler, brighter or darker, more or less contrast, richer or calmer colour.
4. It builds a match from that comparison as a grade on your clip, and Claude looks at the result next to the reference before telling you what it changed.
5. You react to the picture, as you would with a colorist: "the shadows are still too blue", "keep the skin as it was". Each note becomes another change you can see.

What to expect

A match works on the overall colour and tone of the picture, so it gets you close quickly when the two shots were lit in a similar way. When they were not, for example a daylight reference for a night scene, the first match is a starting point, and your notes do the rest. Claude checks that the matched grade does not clip the highlights or crush the shadows, and says so when it would.

The match is an ordinary grade, so you can keep adjusting it, copy it to the other clips in the scene, or export the shot or a LUT of the look.

What you need

A Mac with Apple Silicon and your own Claude Code sign-in. The reference can be any still image or a frame from another clip. Your footage is rendered on your Mac and is not uploaded by Voxel.