KOLOR and its founders

We don’t subscribe to that!

We believe that your work should remain yours, no matter whether you pay a subscription fee or not. Therefore, all KOLOR products are one-time-purchases and it will stay that way, forever.

Everybody Deserve Better Images

Despite being a small company that creates boutique software products, we aim to keep our prices fair as every creative deserves better images.

The Status Quo and the Need for a Colour Renaissance

The best high end colour science is gatekept by big studios and companies.

If you want to use it yourself, you need to go down deep rabbit holes and dig through obscure academic papers. Otherwise, you’re stuck with sub-par colour science in tools that often only became the standard for political reasons.
That even includes software like Lightroom or DaVinci Resolve.

The field is full of deliberately confusing jargon to make you buy into broken, expensive workflows you don’t fully understand. People use their big names to sell you vibe coded AI slop for a premium price. Influencers throw around buzzwords you don’t understand the meaning of to convince you that there is some kind of secret sauce in their plugins.

We do none of that and we’re here to change that.

We hear you!

We’re always happy to hear your opinion on how things should work.
Please, get in touch!

What Colour Science is Not

The term colour science gets thrown around so much it’s hard to know what people even mean when they say it. “I prefer camera X’s colour science to camera Y’s”. “My film emulation has Hollywood level colour science”.

Whenever you hear terms like this thrown around it’s worth pausing and asking yourself: What do these words actually mean? If colour science is a science as the name suggests, how can there be several? It’s not like there are several physics and you pick and choose the one you prefer.

When it comes to the aesthetic rendering of images, the transformation of photon counts on a sensor to a viewable picture on a screen, very few things are set in stone. At every step in the chain, subjective judgements have to be made as to how we arrive at a pleasing image, and defining what a pleasing image even is.

Colour Science = Colourimetry?

Often, when people say colour science, they refer to colourimetry. Most modern colour workflows rely on this discipline.

The idea is to define colours in a coordinate system relative to the “human standard observer”, essentially the spectral sensitivities of human vision and the perception of colour. The problem is the entire framework is based on one almost a century old study – and doesn’t take into account that human perception is extremely context-dependent and there is no way to predict how a colour is perceived based on a tristimulus of Red, Green and Blue alone.

What surrounds the colour stimulus? What has happened previously? What have you had for lunch today? All of these things can change the way you perceive the same stimulus. And yet all of our colour space transformations, and much of every other operation we do in colour grading, rely on colourimetry.

Calling it a science creates a false sense of objectivity or inevitability.

Your Camera’s Colour Science

If we’re talking about the colour science of a camera, this can mean two things:

1. The viewing LUT of the manufacturer, which is really just their serving suggestion of how to transform the raw camera data into an image.
   There are infinite ways you could do this and there is nothing magical or special about the viewing LUTs.
2. The camera is actually doing something to the raw colour data it records other than simply encoding it. In a way that is irreversible, non-linear and has a perceptible effect on the look.

This second option hardly seems desirable seeing as it limits the creatives’ ability to make their own decisions and imposes predefined creative judgements on them.

Following Steve Yedlin, a camera should be a data capturing device, and it should be the creatives’ decision how to form that data into an image that aligns with their vision.

It is our job as developers to provide you with robust tools to translate that creative vision into physical reality.

Often though, developers and manufacturers mean nothing at all when they use the word. They just call whatever they choose to do a “science” because “science” sounds smart, righteous, and suggests expertise and inherent correctness.

It is used in a strangely religious manner. But most of all, it’s a marketing term to make you think you’re buying something secret and special.

Why we use the term anyway

Despite the inherent ambiguity of the term, we decided to use it anyway and here is why:

A general understanding of the term seems to be that “colour science” is anything that turns the data your camera captured into an image.

By that definition, the code inside a plugin, the mere decision what a slider actually does or something as sophisticated as the philosophical framework under which tools are developed; all of that is “colour science”.

In that way, it is possible for “colour sciences” to exist.
Plugin A breaks your image upon adjustment whereas plugin B does not, therefore it’s common to say that plugin B has “better colour science”.

Similarly, if you like the image rendering of application A better than application B, it’s also common to say that application B has “better colour science”.

Digital Sovereignty

Wherever possible, we choose European tools and service providers over American tech giants. But not out of spite.

We believe the unchecked concentration of power in a handful of Silicon Valley corporations is harmful to competition, to innovation, and to the autonomy of individuals and businesses alike.

Supporting European alternatives is our way of investing in a more diverse, more resilient digital ecosystem. When a credible local or European option exists, we use it.

Democratic Values

We do not work with companies whose actions undermine democratic institutions, civil liberties, or the rule of law. This applies to our partners, our vendors, and the platforms we choose to be present on.

Democracy is imperfect, but it remains the best framework we have for protecting individual rights and holding power accountable. We take that seriously when deciding where our money goes.

Your Payments are processed with Integrity

We have made a deliberate decision not to use PayPal or similar financial services whose business practices conflict with our values. This includes concerns around intransparent fees for vendors, opaque dispute resolution, and policies that have historically penalised small businesses and independent creators.

PayPal was also co-founded by Peter Thiel, a fanatic religous extremist who has explicitly stated his goal to end democracy and women’s rights. He is also the founder of Palantir, a mass surveillance company whose express goal is to surveil and kill political opponents.

We opt for payment providers that are – not that- but also transparent, fair, and accountable.

We don’t stalk you around

Beyond its necessary functionality, our website and our newsletter do not track you.

There are no hidden pixels, no open-rate monitoring and no third-party analytics scripts harvesting your behaviour.

For more details, please see our Privacy and Cookie Policy.