CanonCGT: Reference-Based Color Grading via Canonical Pivot Representation

ArXi:2606.01638v1 Announce Type: new 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.