Jianying Colour Grading and LUTs: Filters, Adjustments and Looks

Every editor eventually asks the same question: the footage is cut, but why does it look flat? Colour is the answer, and Jianying gives you three tools that beginners constantly confuse: one tap filters, manual adjustments, and LUTs. They are not interchangeable. Filters restyle, adjustments correct, and LUTs translate a whole look from one piece of footage to another. Grading works when you use them in that order of thinking: fix first, style second.

This guide explains the difference, a reliable grading order for phone footage, and how to protect skin tones while you build a look. The Jianying APK for Android phones page on this site gathers the app details if you are setting up before grading your first project.

Correction before style: the adjustment pass

Open the adjustment panel on a selected clip and work in a fixed order: exposure and brightness first, then contrast, then saturation, then temperature and tint. Highlights and shadows recover detail at the extremes, and sharpness goes last and gently, since phone footage is already sharpened at capture. The goal of this pass is boring footage that is technically right: faces at a natural brightness, whites that read white, no crushed blacks hiding detail.

Grade one representative clip fully, then copy its adjustments across the clips from the same scene. Consistency inside a scene matters more than perfection on any single shot.

Filters: strength is the real control

A Jianying filter is a preset look with an intensity slider, and the slider is where the craft is. Most filters are designed to be seen at full strength in a thumbnail and used at thirty to fifty percent in a real video. Full strength filters crush skin tones and clip highlights; partial strength adds the mood while keeping the person in the frame recognisable. Build a small set of favourites per series so your channel develops a recognisable palette instead of a new personality every upload.

Apply filters after correction, never instead of it. A filter cannot rescue an underexposed clip; it can only make the underexposure warmer. Readers working through this topic usually also need our walkthrough on jianying templates: find, customise and reuse winning formats, which covers the neighbouring step in the same workflow.

LUTs: importing a look

A LUT, or lookup table, maps the colours of your footage to a prepared grade. Jianying lets you import LUT files and apply them like a filter, which is how creators carry a look between their phone and desktop tools, or buy a pack built for a specific camera. LUTs assume well exposed, neutral starting footage, so the correction pass still comes first. If a LUT looks wrong on every clip, the footage underneath usually needs fixing rather than the LUT replacing.

Keep LUT strength moderate for the same reason as filters, and be careful with packs built for log footage: applied to standard phone video they double the contrast the camera already baked in.

Protecting skin tones

Skin is the colour viewers judge unconsciously. After any look is applied, check faces first: if they have gone orange, grey or waxy, pull saturation down a little and warm or cool the temperature back towards neutral. Jianying's HSL controls let you target the orange channel specifically, lowering its saturation while leaving the rest of the scene rich. It is the single most professional adjustment in the app.

Two more guides round out this workflow: jianying export settings: resolution, bitrate and format explained and jianying auto captions: how to generate and style subtitles. Together they cover the steps before and after this one, so a full project never stalls on a missing piece.

A final note from our reviewer

One last practical note from our bench: grade at the brightness your viewers will use, and check one frame on the phone's own screen in daylight. Monitors and previews flatter contrast. Footage that looks moody indoors can collapse into mud outside, and a ten second daylight check has saved more of our test edits than any preset.

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