A · EXPOSURE & COLOR

Color cast

The tint that drags every frame away from neutral.

By Thomas Linck, founder · Updated June 2026

A color cast is an unwanted tint across the whole image, usually from wrong white balance or from mixing light sources — daylight sits near 5600K, a tungsten bulb near 3200K, and a camera can only balance for one. The frame leans orange, blue or green long before anyone can name why. Viewers notice it first on skin tones.

WHY IT MATTERS

Skin is the tone the eye judges hardest, so a cast reads as "something is off" even when the viewer cannot say what. Too warm and the frame goes orange; too cool and it goes blue; cheap LED or fluorescent light throws green. The fix is cheap: white-balance to the dominant source, avoid mixing sources on one face, and correct against a neutral reference in post.

TARGET · STANDARD

Daylight	≈ 5600K	one source, one temperature
Tungsten bulb	≈ 3200K	do not mix with daylight
Fix	neutral reference	grey card or white wall

How CutScore measures it CutScore measures the cast deterministically with OpenCV — the average drift away from neutral across every frame — then names its direction (warm, cool or green) and timestamps where it is strongest, so you know exactly which way to push temperature and tint.

Get this measured automatically See a sample report

QUESTIONS

Frequently asked.

Why does my video look orange or blue?

Wrong white balance. The camera balanced for a different light than the one in your scene: too warm reads orange, too cool reads blue. Set white balance to the dominant source before you roll, and the frame returns to neutral.

How do I remove a color cast?

Find something in the frame that should be neutral — a white wall, a grey card — and adjust temperature and tint until it reads neutral. Skin tones usually fall into place at the same moment. A green cast needs the tint slider, pushed toward magenta.