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By Pravit Gandhi··10 min read

Color.io shut down: what to use instead | Leumos AI

Color.io went offline on 31 December 2025 after Apple acquired its developer. What it did well, and which live tools replace which part of it.

Color.io shut down on 31 December 2025, and nothing live replaces it whole. Split the job instead: Luttie for browser grading and LUT export, fylm.ai for a full browser colour environment, Dehancer for the film look, Colourlab Ai for shot matching. Jonathan Ochmann, who had built and run it alone for over a decade, announced the closure in November 2025 and gave users about five weeks to get their work out. In January 2026 Apple acquired his one-person company, Patchflyer, and Ochmann joined Apple. The purchase surfaced through European regulatory filings, not an announcement, and neither PetaPixel nor MacRumors reports any Apple statement about what happens to the technology. The domain no longer resolves. More than 200,000 people used it.

So there is no version of this you can sign up for, and no date to wait for. What follows is what Color.io actually did, and which live tools cover which part of that.

Before you buy anything, check your Pro licence

If you paid for Pro, you may not have lost the software. CineD's shutdown coverage reports that Pro licence holders were given a fully offline legacy desktop application for macOS, Windows and Linux, plus a PWA build you can self-host. It requires no login, carries the complete Pro toolset, and can be used indefinitely. It also receives no updates, no new features and no bug fixes, so treat it as a tool with a shelf life rather than a permanent home. Still, if your grade is the thing you need this week, dig through the email on your Pro account before you spend money.

What that build will not do is bring your cloud projects back. Ochmann never shipped a full project export, so anything that only existed as a Color.io project went with the servers. Images, LUTs and presets you exported before the deadline are what survived.

What Color.io actually did

This matters more than it sounds, because different people lost completely different things and the replacements are not interchangeable.

It ran in a browser. No install, no GPU requirement, nothing to license per machine. You opened a tab and worked.

It did not stack conventional LUTs. Per CineD, the engine used film-derived math inside a proprietary ultra wide gamut space called VisionLog, with volumetric grain simulation and RAW development for more than 600 camera models. That is why looks held up under exposure changes in a way a baked LUT usually does not, and it is the part of Color.io that nothing on the market reproduces. If that engine is what you are shopping for, adjust your expectations now.

It matched colour from a reference automatically, on stills and single frames.

It exported LUTs, which is how most people actually got their Color.io work into Premiere or Resolve.

Work out which of those four you personally used. The answer decides everything below.

If you used it for the film looks

Dehancer is the closest thing to a like-for-like on the look side, and it models film stocks rather than approximating them with a LUT. It sells as a subscription. On Dehancer's own pricing page the Studio plan is listed at $49 a month, billed $588 a year, covering all the video and photo plugins plus the desktop app, the iOS app and Dehancer Online. There is a Production tier at $184 a month, and separate Business and Lifetime options worth checking on their pricing page.

The plugins are the real product and they need a host: DaVinci Resolve, Final Cut Pro, After Effects, Premiere Pro, Baselight, Photoshop, Lightroom, Capture One, Affinity Photo, Assimilate SCRATCH or Vegas Pro. So this is a step back toward a desktop workflow, which is exactly what a lot of Color.io users were avoiding.

The exception is Dehancer Online, which runs in a browser with no install and is free for up to three photos a day. It carries 86 film presets and the grain, halation and bloom effects. It takes jpeg, heic, tiff or dng, so it is a photo tool, not a video one. For a Color.io user who mostly pushed stills through the browser for a film look, it is the nearest live equivalent, and it costs nothing to try.

If you would rather pay once, FilmConvert Nitrate is a one-time purchase. FilmConvert's purchase page lists it at $119 per host (RRP $149) for the Adobe, Resolve or Final Cut plugin, or $179 for the bundle covering all three (RRP $225), with a Halation add-on at $59, all as of August 2026. It is built on film stock data with camera packs, and it is a plugin, so again you need an NLE. It is not as deep as Dehancer on the modelling side, but you buy it and you own it, which after this year may be worth something to you.

If you used it to build and export LUTs

Luttie is the honest recommendation here and it is the one I would try first. It runs in the browser, it grades a still or a frame you scrub to inside an MP4, MOV or WebM, and it exports .cube or .3dl for Resolve, Premiere, Final Cut and CapCut. The toolset is RGB curves, colour wheels, HSL secondaries, LUT presets you can load your own .cube into, vignette, and grain, halation and bloom. It reads RAW from Sony, Canon, Nikon and Fujifilm bodies and suggests a LUT pack from the EXIF. There is a colour match feature where you drop a reference image and it matches the palette, which is the nearest thing on the list to what Color.io's AI matching did.

Luttie's own pricing lists a Pro Week Pass at $5.99 once, Pro Monthly at $11.99, and Pro Lifetime at $68.99 once. The editor opens without paying; LUT export, RAW files and the AI grading features sit behind Pro. Note that the site renders prices in local currency, so check what it quotes you.

What it does not replace: Color.io's colour science. Luttie is a curves-and-wheels grader with film effects on top, not a film-derived engine. And it grades one frame at a time. Every clip-to-clip decision still happens somewhere else.

If you used it as your browser grading room

fylm.ai is the other serious browser tool still operating. Its own pricing page lists Free with three cloud projects, Lite at $7 a month, Pro at $15 a month, and Team at $30 a month, all billed annually, with custom Enterprise pricing. Lite covers unlimited LUT creation and the AI auto correct, colour extract and colour match features. Pro adds a Premiere Pro extension, NeuralToneAI, 10 GB of cloud storage and client sharing.

fylm.ai comes from photography the same way Color.io did, so the shape will feel familiar: grade an image, build a look, export a LUT, take it into your edit. It is the most complete browser replacement on the list. It is also, like Color.io, not a timeline tool, so if you were using Color.io to normalise forty clips one at a time, you will be doing the same thing here.

If you want no subscription at all, the free version of DaVinci Resolve is still the most capable thing you can install for nothing, on Mac, Windows or Linux, with Resolve Studio 21 at $295 as a one-time purchase. It is a desktop application with a node graph and a real learning curve, and it is the opposite of what people liked about Color.io. It is also the only tool here that will still be around in ten years.

If you used it to match shots across a job

Colourlab Ai is the desktop answer. Colourlab's pricing page lists Colourlab Ai 3 Creator at $15 a month, $150 a year, or $299 perpetual, as of August 2026, running on macOS 13 or later and Windows 10 or later, with Direct Link into DaVinci Resolve, Premiere and Final Cut. It does AI colour match, AI balance and region matching. It is a genuine step up from what Color.io did on matching, and a genuine step down on convenience, because it is an install and it expects you to already work in an NLE.

If what you want is a browser timeline with colour controls rather than a grading tool, Flixier edits video in the browser and its help docs list brightness, vibrance, contrast, saturation, hue rotation, per-channel gamma and filter presets. Those docs do not mention LUT import or log conversion, so treat it as basic correction inside an editor, not a Color.io replacement. Its pricing page rendered in local currency for me, with a free tier and paid per-seat plans, so check what it shows you rather than trusting a dollar figure from me.

Where Leumos AI fits, honestly

I build Leumos AI, so weigh this accordingly.

We are browser-based the way Color.io was: you open a tab, you upload, there is no install and no GPU requirement. The shape is different. Leumos works on an edited timeline rather than a frame. It detects the scene cuts in an upload, grades every shot toward a reference image you drop in, and renders 4K ProRes or H.265 in the cloud.

It is in closed beta as of Q3 2026 and the only thing open is a waitlist. That makes it useless to you this week. If you have a job due Friday, take something from the sections above and come back to this later. I would rather say that than sell you a waitlist as a solution.

What this says about depending on a browser tool

The uncomfortable part is not that Color.io shut down. Software gets discontinued. It is that a tool with more than 200,000 users was one person, and when that person took a job the product ended five weeks later, with no way to export a project.

The lesson is not "avoid browser tools", and it is definitely not "pick a bigger vendor". Big vendors kill products too. The lesson is narrower and more useful: before you commit to anything, find out what leaves the building with you. A .cube file opens in every NLE made. A rendered master is yours. A cloud project in a proprietary format is a rental, and Color.io users found out which one they had on very short notice.

Applying that test to Leumos honestly: we are a closed beta run by a small team, which means less track record than the tools above, not more. What we can say is that a graded 4K master lands on your drive. Judge the rest when there is a product to judge.

Frequently asked questions

What happened to color.io?

It shut down. Jonathan Ochmann announced in November 2025 that the service would close, and the web app went offline on 31 December 2025. Accounts, stored projects and cloud data were deleted on or shortly after that date. In January 2026 Apple acquired Patchflyer, the one-person company behind it, and Ochmann joined Apple. The acquisition was spotted in European regulatory filings rather than announced. The domain does not resolve.

Is color.io coming back, or coming to Final Cut Pro?

Apple has not said. PetaPixel and MacRumors both cover the acquisition and neither reports any Apple statement about product plans; both suggest the technology could turn up in Apple's creative software eventually, which is the outlets' own inference rather than anything Apple has confirmed. Treat anything more specific than that as a guess. Do not plan a workflow around it.

I paid for color.io Pro. Do I still have anything?

Probably yes. According to CineD's coverage of the shutdown, Pro licence holders were given an offline legacy desktop application for macOS, Windows and Linux, plus a self-hostable PWA, with the complete Pro toolset, no login required, usable indefinitely. It gets no updates or bug fixes. Check the email on your Pro account before buying a replacement.

What is the closest live tool to color.io?

There isn't one, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something. Split the job up instead. Luttie is closest for browser grading and LUT export. fylm.ai is closest as a full browser colour environment. Dehancer is closest on the film look, with Dehancer Online being the browser part of it for photos. Colourlab Ai is closest on shot matching. Nothing reproduces Color.io's own colour engine.

Sources

All pricing and availability above was checked against each vendor's own pages in August 2026.

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