Descript Adds Color Adjustment Presets and White Balance Controls.

Descript has overhauled its color correction tools, introducing a redesigned system that brings presets, granular sliders, and white balance controls directly into the Properties panel.

The update, announced in the company's changelog, moves color adjustments out of the Effects menu and into a more accessible location. The shift reflects a broader push to make professional-grade video editing features available to creators who may not have formal training in color grading.

The redesigned color adjustment panel includes five preset filters: Neutral, Warm, Cool, Pop, and Black and White. These offer quick starting points for common color treatments without requiring manual slider adjustments.

Beyond presets, Descript has added a white balance eyedropper tool that lets editors correct color casts caused by indoor lighting or outdoor shadows. The expanded controls now include dedicated sliders for Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Saturation, Temperature, and Tint, organized into clear sections within the Properties panel.

To apply the new tools, users select an image or video layer, open the Properties panel, and access the Color adjustments section. From there, they can apply a preset or fine-tune individual parameters.

Descript has updated the underlying color model that powers the Temperature and Tint sliders. The previous Temperature control used an incorrect red/blue range; the new model uses the correct yellow/blue range and is properly calibrated to industry standards.

Projects with existing color adjustments will prompt users to upgrade before editing those settings. The upgrade is reversible through undo, allowing editors to revert to the old behavior if they prefer to preserve their original settings.

This release follows Descript's recent brand refresh and media library overhaul, which introduced drive-level media organization and new AI models for its Underlord assistant.

The same changelog entry also revealed a unified media generation panel that consolidates image and video generation into a single interface. Users can now switch between Image and Video tabs within the same panel, replacing the previous workflow that required navigating to separate locations.

Descript also introduced a "Create a scene" overlay that appears when the Scene editor is blank. The overlay provides quick access to media generation, layout selection, and layer addition, reducing the number of clicks required to start building a scene.

The color correction update addresses a long-standing request from video editors who use Descript for podcast and video production. While the platform has traditionally focused on transcript-based editing, recent updates have expanded its capabilities in traditional video post-production workflows, positioning it more directly against tools like Adobe Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve.