Color Cast

A color cast is an unwanted tint of one hue spread across the whole image, like an orange wash from tungsten light shot on a daylight setting or a green cast from fluorescents. It usually traces back to white balance being off in camera. Colorists diagnose casts on a parade scope, where an imbalance shows as one channel sitting consistently higher or lower than the others, and on neutral references like grays and whites that should be colorless. The fix is to rebalance the channels using lift, gamma, and gain or a white-balance picker, neutralizing the offending color until skin and grays read true. Catching and correcting a cast early matters because everything graded on top inherits it, so a clean neutral base keeps the rest of the work honest.