{"ID":2921214,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-02T02:42:49.606572591Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-04T00:54:56.190393508Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.01638","arxiv_id":"2606.01638","title":"CanonCGT: Reference-Based Color Grading via Canonical Pivot Representation","abstract":"Reference-based color grading aims to reproduce the tonal mood and lighting of a reference while preserving color harmony and scene structure. Existing photorealistic and filter-based methods often produce unstable tone mappings -- over-shifting or inconsistently retaining colors -- leading to unnatural results. We propose CanonCGT, a two-stage framework built on a canonical pivot -- a style-neutral intermediate representation for stable color mapping. The first stage canonicalizes the input by removing intrinsic tonal bias, and the second color-grades it to match the reference style. A dual-phase training scheme, DP-CGT, combines supervised preset learning with self-supervised refinement on unpaired photographs. CanonCGT delivers photorealistic and tonally consistent results across diverse datasets, surpassing state-of-the-art methods in stability and visual fidelity. Our codes are available at \\href{https://github.com/Jinwon-Ko/CanonCGT}{https://github.com/Jinwon-Ko/CanonCGT}","short_abstract":"Reference-based color grading aims to reproduce the tonal mood and lighting of a reference while preserving color harmony and scene structure. Existing photorealistic and filter-based methods often produce unstable tone mappings -- over-shifting or inconsistently retaining colors -- leading to unnatural results. We pro...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.01638","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.01638v1","authors":"[\"Jinwon Ko\",\"Keunsoo Ko\",\"Chang-Su Kim\"]","published":"2026-06-01T03:42:20Z","proceeding":"cs.CV","tasks":"[\"cs.CV\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false,"code_links":[{"ID":612574,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-02T02:42:49.606572591Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-02T02:42:49.606572591Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_id":2921214,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.01638","paper_title":"CanonCGT: Reference-Based Color Grading via Canonical Pivot Representation","repo_url":"https://github.com/Jinwon-Ko/CanonCGT","is_official":false,"mentioned_in_paper":false,"mentioned_in_github":true,"github_stars":0}]}