Color Adjustments

Color Adjustments is the per-material grading panel. It exposes brightness, contrast, saturation, and gamma in the same place you author the material, so you can tune look-dev without spawning a post-process volume per object.

When to use it

Look-dev tweaks without touching the post-process stack.
Material variations — a desaturated “broken” state, a contrast-boosted hero.
Frozen or dead states — pull saturation to zero instantly via script.

Order of operations

Color Adjustments run after lighting and emission but before the transparency blend. Saturation cuts on a transparent surface therefore also dull whatever shows through it — usually the intent, but worth knowing.

How it works

Genesis takes the post-lighting color, applies (c - 0.5) * _Contrast + 0.5 + _Brightness, converts to luminance for the saturation lerp, then applies pow(c, 1.0 / _Gamma). The order is fixed, but each pass is effectively disabled by leaving its parameter at the neutral value.

Properties

Inspector label	Shader property	Type	Default	Description
Brightness	_Brightness	Float (-1–1)	0.0	Additive offset applied after lighting.
Contrast	_Contrast	Float (0–2)	1.0	Multiplier around mid-grey (0.5). 0 = flat, 2 = punchy.
Saturation	_Saturation	Float (0–2)	1.0	0 = greyscale, 1 = neutral, 2 = vivid.
Gamma	_Gamma	Float (0.1–4)	1.0	Creative power curve. 2.2 darkens midtones, 0.45 lifts them.
Tint Color	_TintColor	Color	RGB(1,1,1)	Final multiplicative tint.
Adjustment Mask	_ColorAdjustmentMask	Texture2D	white	Mask limiting the grade to UV regions.

Usage

Start with neutral defaults and bracket one parameter at a time.
A saturation of 0.6–0.8 is the safest cinematic look.
Keep contrast below 1.4 for material work; higher values crush detail.
Use the mask to grade only part of a UV — for example, desaturate armor but keep skin warm.


material.SetFloat("_Saturation", 0.4f);
material.SetFloat("_Contrast", 1.15f);
material.SetColor("_TintColor", new Color(1.0f, 0.95f, 0.88f));

Tips & gotchas

Brightness changes the lightmap balance — if you push it on lightmapped objects, rebake.
Gamma here is a creative power curve, not gamma correction. Fix linear/gamma mismatches in the project color-space setting instead.
Stack with Hue Shift for combined HSV grading per material.
Cost is roughly five ALU per pixel, so it is trivial on mobile.

Hue Shift — HSV rotation alongside the grade.
Greyscale & Posterize — stronger stylized quantization.
Emission — emission runs before this stage.
Gooch Shading — diffuse-level grading.