Color
The Color tool sets the colour of the subtitle text across a whole file. Yellow over bright footage, a second colour to tell one speaker apart, or stripping the colours a downloaded file arrived with — all of it in one pass.
Choosing a colour
Eight presets cover what subtitles are actually set in — white, yellow, cyan, green, orange, red, magenta and black — and Custom opens your system colour picker for anything else. None does the opposite: it removes colouring rather than applying it, and it is what the tool starts on, so opening a file changes nothing until you pick something.
Contrast is what makes a subtitle readable, not the colour itself. White and yellow survive almost any footage; mid-tones like green and orange disappear over bright scenes unless the file also draws an outline. If you are choosing for a specific film rather than out of habit, check a bright scene as well as a dark one.
What gets written, per format
Colour is spelled differently in each format, and writing markup a format ignores would look like it worked while changing nothing on screen. The tool writes the right thing for the file you opened, and the note under the picker tells you which:
| ASS / SSA | A {\c&Hbbggrr&} override at the start of each line. ASS orders its colour channels backwards, which the tool handles. Outline and shadow colours are separate tags and are left alone. |
|---|---|
| SRT | A <font color="#rrggbb"> tag around each subtitle — the convention every player that supports coloured SubRip understands. |
| WebVTT | The same <font> tag. VLC and mpv honour it; browsers do not, because WebVTT expects colour to come from a stylesheet rather than from markup. If the file is for a web player, style it in CSS instead. |
Colouring replaces, it does not layer
For SRT and WebVTT, any <font> tags already in the file are removed before the new colour is applied. A colour meant for a whole line cannot sit underneath one that wraps half of it — there would be no telling which was supposed to win — so the file gets one unambiguous colour instead of two fighting.
Bold, italic and underline are untouched: <i> and its friends are not colour and survive the pass. In ASS, only the primary fill tag is replaced, so an event that also sets an outline colour keeps it.
This is what makes None genuinely useful — it is the way to strip the colouring out of a downloaded file and get back to plain text, in one pass, without hand-editing.
Colouring part of a file, or one speaker
The tool applies one colour to the whole file. To colour individual lines — a second speaker, a sign, a song — edit them in Edit Subtitles, or set it up properly with named styles in an ASS file, which is what ASS exists for.