What color matching does
You have two photos: one where the light came out right, and one that didn't. Color matching reads the color distribution of the first and pushes the second towards it — the sunset warmth, the cold cast of an overcast afternoon, the split between warm highlights and cool shadows that a film stock would give you. It is how a photographer makes twenty frames from one shoot look like one shoot.
Two algorithms, and when each one is right
Both work in Lab, where lightness is one channel and color is the other two. That separation is the whole point — it lets the tool move color without dragging brightness along with it.
- Shadow anchor — leaves lightness untouched and shifts only the a/b channels towards the reference's mid-tone average, fading the shift out in the darkest tones. Shadows keep their density instead of picking up the reference's cast. Start here.
- Global — matches the full histogram of all three channels by CDF. Contrast comes across with the color, so the result sits closer to the reference and further from your original. Use it when you want the reference's whole look, contrast included.
The strength slider mixes the result back towards the original. At 0% nothing happens; at 100% you get the algorithm's full opinion. Most photos land somewhere around 60–90%.
How to use it
- Upload the photo you want to correct — it opens in the editor with a Color Matching step ready.
- Pick the reference: the photo whose colors you want.
- Choose an algorithm and pull the strength slider until the preview looks right.
- For shadow anchor, three thresholds decide which lightness range counts as mid-tone. They are seeded from your reference's own percentiles, so most of the time you can leave them alone.
- Stack a crop, a resize or a target file size on top, then download.
The reference never leaves your device
Neither does the photo you're correcting. PIXLFLW reads both in the browser; the reference is reduced to a histogram the moment you pick it and the pixels are dropped. Supported formats: GIF, JPG, BMP, PNG, WEBP, HEIC, TIFF.
What it can't do
Color matching transfers a distribution, not a scene. If your photo is lit by fluorescent tubes and the reference by a sunset, the result gets warmer, but the shadows still fall where they fell. It also won't rescue a blown-out sky — clipped highlights have no color left to match.