Two colourists who got tired of explaining the same thing.
Chroma started as a preset pack we kept emailing to people after workshops, and the emails kept coming with the same four questions attached. So we built the tool and the teaching together, because separately neither one works.
Between us we spent about fifteen years grading other people's footage — commercials, documentaries, a lot of corporate work nobody puts on a reel. The pattern was always the same: the client's own editor could cut beautifully and could not make it look like anything.
Every tool aimed at them was either a locked preset pack that produced the same teal-and-orange as everyone else, or a full colour suite with a two-week learning curve and a monthly bill. Nothing sat in between.
So Chroma is deliberately in between. Small enough to learn in an afternoon, open enough that every preset comes apart into the controls that made it, and sold once rather than rented forever.
- It stays small
- Feature requests get refused more often than they get built. Every control added is another thing between an editor and a finished shot.
- No locked looks
- Every preset opens into the wheels and the curve that made it. A tool you cannot learn from is a tool you stay dependent on.
- Bought, not rented
- One payment, two machines, all of version 2. We will not move to a subscription — people bought partly because we said that.
- The teaching is not an upsell
- The academy exists because the plugin does not work without it for most buyers. That is why it is in the bundle rather than sold separately.
Mara Vance
Fifteen years grading commercials and documentary. Wrote the presets and refuses about half the feature requests.
Ivo Brandt
Built GPU pipelines for a broadcast vendor before this. The reason it stays real-time on an old laptop.