Color Match Panel¶
A dedicated floating panel for matching one or more clips' colour to a
reference clip. Reached via Colour → Color Match Panel (Ctrl+Alt+C)
or its toolshelf icon.
📷 Screenshot placeholder
The full panel — reference viewer and target/result viewer side by side, clip grid below, controls strip in between.
This is the primary place to do reference-based colour matching in Transduce. It supersedes the older right-click/menu-based Set Reference and Match to Reference commands that used to live only in the Input Panel and Colour menu — those entry points are gone; this panel (plus the ★ toggle described below) is now the one place that workflow lives.
Layout¶
- Reference viewer (left) and target/result viewer (right) — each a real, independent playback viewer with its own transport controls (play/step/scrub), a frame-position scrub bar, and a cache-fill indicator, backed by the same background decode-ahead buffering the main app viewer uses. The target viewer live-follows whatever's most recently clicked in the clip grid below.
- A circular Match arrow button sits between the two viewers — it triggers the same Match action as the controls strip's own Match button.
- Controls strip: Set Reference, Select Targets, and Match buttons on the left; grid-size (S/M/L) and Undo/Redo on the right.
- Clip grid below, showing every clip in the project as a thumbnail card.
Set a reference clip¶
Click Set Reference with a clip selected in the grid, or set it from any of two other places — they all drive the exact same project-wide reference, kept in sync everywhere:
- The gold ★ that appears on a clip's thumbnail in the Input Panel's clip bin marks the current reference clip (display only in that panel — set it from here, or from the main viewer's own "Use as Reference" transport button).
- Clicking Set Reference again on the clip that's already the reference clears it.
Setting the reference from the main viewer also carries over its current playhead frame and checks Use Frame, so the exact frame you were looking at becomes the one the match algorithm samples from.
Select targets — Target Selection mode¶
Press Select Targets to arm target-selection mode (the button stays highlighted while armed). While armed, clicking clips in the grid builds a target set using the same modifier vocabulary as ordinary multi-select, plus two new gestures for removing clips from an already-built set:
| Click | Effect |
|---|---|
| Click / Shift-click / Cmd-click | Add the clicked clip (or range) to the target set |
| Option-click | Remove the clicked clip from the target set |
| Option-Shift-click | Remove a range of clips from the target set |
The status line shows this gesture legend while armed, along with a live count of how many clips are currently targeted. This mode is built for large batches — hundreds of clips — where a single click- and-commit selection isn't practical; the same shift/cmd vocabulary you already know for ordinary selection carries over directly.
Press Match when the target set is ready. A successful match auto-disarms Select Targets (so a stray click afterward can't silently extend an already-dispatched set) — the target set itself is not cleared, so pressing Select Targets again resumes editing the same set if you need to re-match.
The reference clip can never be added to the target set — clicking it while armed has no effect.
Match¶
Click Match (or the circular arrow button between the viewers) to run the match. Each targeted clip gets a new, fully editable "Match to Reference" layer in its Layer Stack — a statistical (percentile-based) match: black point, white point, and midtone are mapped toward the reference clip's measured values, per channel. The status line shows live "Matching clip N of M…" progress during the batch, then a summary when it's done.
Treat the result as a starting point, not a finished grade — see Layer Stack → Layers from Match to Reference for how to dial back an overcorrecting match.
Clip grid — card colours¶
Each card's border colour shows its current state (no background fill, border colour only):
| Colour | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Gold | The reference clip |
| Blue | Currently in the target set |
| Green | Already matched to the reference |
| Grey | Selected (clicked) but not yet added to the target set — only shown while Select Targets is armed |
The reference clip can't be selected as a target at all — the distinction above is deliberate: blue only ever means "will be matched," never "just clicked."
Undo/redo¶
The panel's own Undo/Redo buttons trigger the app's single shared undo
stack — the same one Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Shift+Z and the Edit menu use.
There's no separate undo history for this panel.
Note
Undoing a Match reverts the Layer Stack entry and the viewer immediately; the clip grid's own thumbnail image can briefly lag behind the same change (its border colour updates correctly, the pixel image itself catches up on next full refresh).