Privacy policy

Colormetric Labs is operated by Prajwal Naik, based in Kumta, Karnataka, India. Prajwal Naik is the controller of the personal data described on this page and can be reached at support@colormetriclabs.com.

There is no separate data protection officer; questions go to the same address and are answered by the operator.

Your account. Email address, an account identifier, an optional display name, and the dates the account was created and last updated. Authentication is handled by Firebase Authentication (Google). If you sign in with Google we receive your email address and display name from Google; we never receive your Google password.
Why: to give you an account, to link your purchases to it, and to contact you about them. Legal basis: performance of a contract with you.

Purchases. The order amount, currency, status, our order reference, the payment provider's order and payment identifiers, and the dates involved. Payments are processed by Razorpay; we never see or store your card number, UPI handle or bank details.
Why: to sell you the product and to keep the financial records the law requires. Legal basis: performance of a contract, and a legal obligation to retain accounting records.

Agreements you accept. Which documents you accepted, the version of each, the date and time, the exact wording you accepted, and your browser's user-agent string. We keep nothing derived from your IP address: the account that accepted is identified by its own sign-in and email address, which is better evidence than a value nobody can read back.
Why: so that both of us have a record of what was agreed. Legal basis: legal obligation and our legitimate interest in being able to evidence consent.

Device data used for licensing. Described in full in the next section. Legal basis: performance of a contract — the 3-computer limit is a term of the licence you bought and cannot be enforced without it.

Downloads. Which release you downloaded, and when. We keep nothing derived from the requesting IP address.
Why: to help with support and to detect abuse of download links. Legal basis: legitimate interest in protecting the service.

Email we send you. Order confirmations, confirmations of terms you accepted, and notices when a computer is activated or removed. These are service messages: they go to every customer they concern, and they carry no unsubscribe link because there is nothing to opt out of.
Marketing. Release news and offers go only to customers who asked for them — by ticking the opt-in box at signup or switching it on in their account settings. Every marketing email carries a one-click unsubscribe link that takes effect immediately, and we keep a suppression record so an address that opted out is never mailed again unless it opts back in.
Legal basis: performance of a contract for the service messages; your consent for marketing, which you can withdraw at any time.

A grading project may contain personal data in the stills and footage, as well as information about you and the production.

We process the stills, footage, brief, camera information, project settings and related communications to assess your request, quote the project, produce the preview, complete and deliver the grade, provide support, maintain security, and resolve disputes. We do not use submitted media for advertising, a portfolio, model training or unrelated purposes unless we first obtain a separate, voluntary permission that you may refuse without affecting the service.

If you provide an Instagram handle or portfolio link, providing it is optional. We use it only to understand the visual style relevant to your grading request unless we clearly tell you otherwise.

Project files are stored using access controls and are not intended to be publicly readable. Customer download links are time-limited. We restrict access to people and service providers who need it to operate, secure or support the service.

Source stills and footage are normally deleted within 90 days of project closure and never later than that, unless you request earlier deletion, a longer period is agreed for an active support issue, or law requires preservation. The period that applies to your project is shown on the project itself and may be shorter. Delivered grading files are retained for up to 730 days to support re-download and are then deleted. Transaction, invoice, contractual-acceptance and dispute records are retained separately for the periods required by tax, accounting, consumer-protection and other applicable law.

Deleting source media does not require deletion of records that we must retain by law or need in order to establish, exercise or defend legal claims. Conversely, tax record-keeping does not by itself mean that the uploaded footage must be retained.

To enforce the 3-computer limit, the plugin sends the following when you activate a computer:

• A SHA-256 hash of an identifier your operating system already assigns to the machine (IOPlatformUUID on macOS, MachineGuid on Windows). The raw value never leaves your computer and cannot be recovered from the hash we store.
• A SHA-256 hash of a random identifier generated when the plugin was installed. It is not derived from anything about you or your hardware.
• The name of the computer and its operating system, so you can tell your machines apart in your account. These are labels only — they are never used to authenticate anything.
• The version of the plugin, so we can help if something goes wrong.

That is the entire list of what a plugin sends to us. No plugin reads serial numbers, MAC addresses, disk identifiers, running processes or other installed software, and none sends your projects or your footage to Colormetric Labs. The rendering plugins send nothing at all while rendering a frame.

The same check repeats while you use the software. An activation is not a one-off. The authorisation on each computer has to be renewed to keep proving the licence is still yours, so the plugin checks in again automatically: at most about once a day while it is running, and once more each time you load it. Nothing about this is hidden from you — it is also described in the terms.

Each repeat check-in sends only:

• The identifier of that computer's activation record, and a secret held only by that installation, which together prove the request comes from a computer you activated. The secret is replaced on every successful check-in.
• The same two hashes listed above, so a moved or cloned installation is not silently accepted.
• The version of the plugin.

No new category of data appears at this stage, and nothing about your work is included. What we record against that computer's activation record is the date of the check and the plugin version — the previous values are overwritten, so we hold the latest check, not a history of your working hours. Routine check-ins are not written to the licence audit trail.

As with any request over the internet, our server necessarily sees the IP address the connection comes from — that is how a reply gets back to you. We do not store it against your licence, your account or that computer's activation record. A repeat check-in is throttled by its activation record rather than by where it came from, so a studio behind one connection is not limited as though it were one machine.

One product sends something else, to somebody else, and it is described in full below.

Two anti-piracy measures are worth describing plainly, because both touch things people reasonably ask about — and neither sends us anything new.

The plugin checks its own program files. On your computer, a rendering plugin verifies that its own binary is the one we released and has not been patched or tampered with. This is a comparison the plugin makes locally against a value carried inside its signed licence; the result stays on your machine, and nothing about it is sent to Colormetric Labs. It reads only its own file — not other software, not your disk, not your processes.

Licensed output carries an invisible marker. When a computer holds an active licence, the image a rendering plugin produces carries an invisible marker that identifies the licence it was rendered under. It identifies the licence, not you and not your computer: the mapping from a licence to a customer exists only in our backend and is never embedded in the image. The marker is there so that a file leaked from an unlicensed, refunded or tampered copy can be traced back to the licence responsible for it. It does not change how the image looks, it is not sent anywhere by the plugin — it lives in the file you export — and watermarked (unlicensed) output does not carry it at all. Removing or defeating it is a breach of the terms.

Metis is an assistant colourist. To answer a question about a shot it has to send something about that shot to a language model — and that model is not ours. It runs on an API key you supply, from a provider you choose, billed to your own account under that provider's terms.

Colormetric Labs is not in that path. The requests go from your computer straight to the provider. We never see your API key, the frames you send, what you ask, or what comes back. There is nothing for us to keep, and no retention period on our side to state, because none of it reaches us.

When you send a request, Metis may include:

• A still of the frame you are on, scaled down and compressed. Never at full resolution, and never video.
• A reference image, if you chose one, the same way.
• Measurements taken from those frames — brightness distribution, colour balance, saturation, palette. Numbers, not pictures.
• Facts about the project: colour management settings, the clip's camera and codec, and the labels of the nodes in the grade.
• Clip and project names, only if you switch that on. It is off by default, because a file name is often a client's name.
• What you typed.

Every one of those is a switch in the panel's Settings, and turning one off means the item is not assembled rather than that the model is asked to ignore it. Switching off network access stops Metis contacting anything at all; it will still read your project and measure the frame, and will say that it cannot answer.

Your API key is stored by your operating system's own credential store — Keychain on macOS, DPAPI on Windows. If that is unavailable, Metis holds the key in memory for the session and tells you so. It never writes a key to disk in the clear, never sends one to us, and its logs never contain one.

The provider's terms are the ones that apply to what you send them, including how long they keep it and whether it may be used for training. Those are between you and them, on your account. Read them before you send a client's footage anywhere:

• Anthropic — for Claude models.
• Google — for Gemini models.
• OpenAI — for GPT models.

These are not our sub-processors. We have no contract with them on your behalf and no visibility into your usage: you hold the account, you set the key, and you can revoke it at any time without telling us.

Colormetric Labs is a trading name of Prajwal Naik, who operates the service personally. He is the only person with routine access to customer data, including any footage sent for grading. There are no employees or contractors with standing access.

Beyond that, we use these providers, and only these. The AI providers Metis can talk to are not in this list because they are not ours — you hold that account, and the section above says what goes to them:

• Google Cloud / Firebase — hosting, authentication, database, file storage and abuse protection (App Check / reCAPTCHA Enterprise). Grading stills and footage are stored here, in Google Cloud Storage.
• Razorpay — payment processing. Razorpay is the controller of your payment instrument data under its own privacy policy.
• Brevo — email delivery. Every email listed above is sent through Brevo's infrastructure: our backend queues each message and the Firebase Trigger Email extension delivers it via Brevo's SMTP servers. Sign-in verification and password-reset emails are sent by Firebase Authentication's own mailer instead.
• Google Analytics — aggregate visit statistics, only if you allow the measurement category. Nothing is loaded and nothing is sent until you do.

Where this puts your data. The service is operated from India, and Prajwal Naik accesses it from India. Google Cloud and Razorpay operate internationally and may process data outside your own country under their own terms. If you are in the EEA or the UK and need the specific transfer mechanism that applies to your material, write to us and we will tell you what is in place before you send anything.

We do not sell your personal data, and we do not share it with advertisers or data brokers. Advertising and measurement cookies, if you allow them, are covered by the cookie policy.

Our infrastructure runs on Google Cloud. Your account, orders, licences and support tickets are stored in India (Google Cloud region asia-south1, Mumbai), and that is where our servers run. Some supporting services — authentication and email delivery among them — may additionally process data elsewhere, including in the United States.

India has no European Commission adequacy decision, so a transfer out of the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom is made under the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses, which our providers incorporate into their terms. If you would like to know which provider handles a particular part of your data, ask us and we will tell you.

• Account details: until you ask us to delete them.
• Orders, invoices and refunds: retained for as long as tax and accounting law requires (in India, this is generally eight years), even after an account is deleted.
• Consent records: for as long as the related purchase record, so the agreement stays evidenced.
• Device activation records: while the seat is in use, and afterwards as licence history.
• Download logs: 12 months.

You can ask us to give you a copy of your data, correct it, delete it, restrict or object to how we use it, or receive it in a portable form. You can also complain to your local data protection authority. How to exercise each of these is set out on the your data rights page.

These products are professional tools sold to adults. We do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 18. If you believe a child has given us data, write to support@colormetriclabs.com and we will delete it.

When this policy changes materially we publish a new version with a new date, and where the change affects something you agreed to, we ask you to accept the new version. The version that applied when you made a purchase remains on record against that purchase.

Questions about any of this: support@colormetriclabs.com.