Cinematic grades, ready out of the box. That's the headline for version 2.15 of Color Finale 2 Pro, our color grading plugin for Final Cut Pro. It ships on 28 April 2026.

Pick your camera from the ACES menu. Click a thumbnail in the Looks browser. Your footage is graded, professionally and in a single pass, before you've opened the user guide.

That's the fast path, and the fast path doesn't put a ceiling on anything. Every tool a working colorist reaches for is waiting one layer down: wheels, curves, secondaries, masks, scopes, LUT management with colorimetric trim, film grain, halation, and print-stock emulation. You can start fast and go as deep as you want, on your own schedule.

Pick your camera. Get a good-looking image.

The fastest path from log or raw footage to a pleasing image is ACES. It handles dynamic range and out-of-gamut colors in a way that an "apply a LUT" workflow never will, provided your exact camera has a proper IDT waiting for it. 2.15 rebuilds the Input Space popup and ships dedicated transforms for a long list of cameras.

It's organized by manufacturer now. Alexa, ALEXA 35, iPhone in Apple Log, the Canon cinema bodies (C100, C300 Mark II, the whole EOS range in C-Log 2 or 3), Sony A-series in S-Log3, Panasonic in V-Log, Blackmagic Pocket, Fujifilm in F-Log or F-Log2, Nikon in N-Log, DJI in D-Log, RED in Log3G10, Leica in L-Log. For each of these, there's a proper transform waiting. Pick the manufacturer, pick the log variant, and the image you're looking at is already halfway to a look before you've moved a slider.

If you only take one thing away from this post, this is probably the change that makes the biggest difference for the most people.

Looks: something to load on day one

ACES gets you to a sane starting point. A Look gets you to a finished one.

A Look is the whole inspector state (Corrections, Film Emulation, Color Management, your entire Layers stack, bypass states and all) captured as a single file you can re-apply with a click. 2.15 ships a starter set of them, so brand-new users have something to try immediately. Browse by category, click a thumbnail, and your footage is graded. That's the shortest path to "oh, I see what this plugin can do."

Looks are also the easiest thing in Color Finale to learn from. Apply one you like, open the Layers panel, and see how it's built. Most of us learned grading by taking someone else's stack apart, and that still works.

And because a Look is just a .cflook file (plain JSON under the hood), you can email one to a colleague, bundle a pack of them, or drop one on the Looks window to import. Looks are the piece of Color Finale designed to be passed around.

White balance that actually works

White balance is the single control that most often separates a good image from a mediocre one. Nail it and you've solved half the shot. Miss it, and nothing you do afterwards will rescue it. The new auto white balance engine in 2.15 is built to not miss.

It looks for reliable neutral cues in the image and falls back to a secondary method when the scene doesn't have any: colorful night exteriors, monochromatic landscapes, heavy theatrical lighting. A colored dot next to the Auto button tells you how confident it is. Green means you can trust it. Yellow is worth a second look. Red means it took a guess, and you should too.

There's also a new Skin picker. Pick a skin tone (a forehead, a cheek) and Color Finale calculates a white balance that produces natural, flattering skin, rather than forcing whatever you clicked to neutral gray. This is the picker you want for interviews, portraits, and narrative dialogue, where "physically neutral" isn't what you're after.

The engine is versioned per-project, so clips you've already graded in an earlier version keep their existing balance. New clips get the new engine automatically.

The film emulation workflow, finally complete

Color Finale's film emulation toolkit already covers subtractive grading, halation, bloom, vignette and film grain. 2.15 adds the piece that completes the workflow: the print.

Most of what audiences mean when they say "film look" is really a print-stock look: the positive film you'd strike from a graded negative and run through a projector. 2.15 adds eight of them, scanned from real print stock and fitted to live inside the ACES pipeline before the display transform, so the print character carries through cleanly.

• Kodak 2383: the big warm Hollywood-release look, with dense blacks and golden highlights. A sensible default.
• Kodak 2393: Vision Premier. Punchier, with a crisper rolloff. Good for anything with energy.
• Fuji 3510: low-contrast Eterna-CP, with a gentler rolloff and flattering skin. The quiet alternative.
• Fuji 3513: standard Eterna-CP. Slightly more contrast, with Fuji's green-leaning neutrals.
• Fuji 3519: higher-contrast Fuji. The Fuji palette with some bite.
• Fuji 3521: a modern Fuji print with cleaner highlights.
• Agfa CP30: the odd one out, deliberately so. Cooler magentas and greens. It reads as European arthouse to a lot of viewers.
• Kodak 2302 B&W: a real black-and-white print. Use this instead of dragging Saturation to zero; a flat desat doesn't track skin and skies the way a B&W print does.

Each stock ships at a fixed strength chosen to sit naturally on top of an ACES grade. Pair one with film grain and halation and you've got a complete celluloid emulation in about four sliders.

Under the hood

A few changes that aren't headline features but matter once you're in the tool every day.

LUTs now run through ACES. Your working space is converted to the LUT's declared input space, the LUT is applied, and the result is converted back into ACES. You get the full ACES handling of out-of-gamut colors through the LUT, which in practice means no more highlight clipping or saturation artifacts that naïve LUT-apply used to produce.

Tone and Chroma on LUT layers. Two trim sliders that let you dial a LUT's contrast and color back independently. A LUT is often exactly the palette you want at exactly the wrong strength, and pulling global opacity drags both axes at once. Now you can keep the contrast shape while easing the color cast, or vice versa, without leaving the LUT layer.

Faster GPU grain, faster GPU ACES. The grain synthesizer is now a GPU-native model and substantially faster. The RRT+ODT stage of ACES runs per-pixel on the GPU rather than through a cube LUT, and you can see the smoothness difference across highlights without looking for it.

A detachable Layers panel. You can pop the Layers panel out of the main window and drag it to a second display, so the viewer sits on one screen and the full layer stack stays visible on the other. A noticeable change in flow if you've been working cramped on a laptop.

Rebuilt frame capture under Image Analysis. Unglamorous but solid. More reliable with Final Cut Pro 12 and later. If you don't notice anything, it's working. No stalls, no glitches, just analysis running the way it should.

Try it

If you're on active support, all of this is yours now. Check for Updates inside the plugin.

If not, start a free 7-day trial. Pick your camera. Apply a Look. Sample a skin tone with the Skin picker. See where you land in two minutes, then keep going if you want to.

Or extend your updates if your year's expired and you want back in.