In File > Project Settings > Color, turn these two off. Both must be off:
Decoloris decodes your footage itself, through Camera Input. With these on, Premiere changes what reaches Decoloris, and the picture comes out wrong.
For the best results, set the rest of the tab like this:
These are saved with each project, so check them when you start a new one or after resetting Premiere's settings. Display Color Management is a separate setting (see Which Output should I choose?).
Yes, if you leave them on. Every overlay in this panel — the Scope menu, the Show menu and Show Tone Curves — is drawn into the frame by the render, not painted over your viewer. There is deliberately no preview-only mode, because a readout that looked different depending on your viewer quality would be a readout you could not compare against itself. The amber DIAG badge at top center exists to tell you one is live. Check for it before you export.
Because they are measuring different things, on purpose. Both read the Output, but the Decoloris scopes read the tone-and-color chain: grain, dirt, halation, diffusion, MTF, adjacency, dye cloud, local contrast, denoise, vignette, gate weave and flicker are not in the reading, so what you see is the tone and color transfer at the Output, not the rendered picture. Out-of-gamut color is plotted outside the solid hexagon rather than clipped, because that is the most useful thing an in-chain scope can tell you. Your host's scope sits at the end of everything and measures the rendered picture. Both numbers are right about their own question.
By decision, and the FAQ you are reading is the answer: hover tooltips pop up over the work and distract more than they teach. The full guide lives here instead — one place, searchable, every control, no popups over your footage. The panel points here itself: the Setup group's label reads Setup - decoloris.com/faq, and every control label in the panel appears word for word in this guide, so searching the page for a label lands on its answer.
Five modules — Grain, Halation, Film Sharpness (MTF), Edge Effects (Adjacency) and Dye Cloud — each have their own stock popup, and each defaults to Match Stock, which derives the setting from your main Stock (Negative) selection. That is why a follower popup can be sitting on a value you did not choose. Pick an entry explicitly to override it. It also has a consequence worth knowing: many of the sliders under those popups say "(Manual)" in their labels, and Match Stock is an entry, so those sliders are not reaching the picture until you set that module's popup to Manual.
No. Every render module is built so that a half- or quarter-resolution preview looks like your full-size export scaled down to that size; only speed changes. That covers Film Sharpness, Gate Weave, Halation and its Aura, Dye Cloud, Dirt, Grain and Diffusion, and lower playback qualities and draft renders don't change the look either (see Should I ever turn High Quality off?). The readouts read a fixed grid of the frame, so the T/M quote, the skin numbers, CLIP and Range Check read the same at every playback size.
Three honest limits:
That's the trial mark. Without a license, Decoloris renders everything (every control, every host, full resolution) and draws a faint tiled DECOLORIS across the frame at an angle. It is dark over light areas and light over dark ones, so it shows everywhere, and it is in your exports too. It is the only difference between the trial and the licensed plug-in. Once your license is installed, the mark goes away on the next frame Decoloris renders, with no restart. With two copies of Decoloris on a shot (see Can I use one Decoloris per clip and one for the whole timeline?), each draws its own mark. When a diagnostic is on, the amber DIAG badge draws over the mark. To buy a license and install it, see Get started.
One line each, for the words the panel and this guide lean on.
Six stages, in this order, and the panel is laid out in that order too.
1. Camera decode. Decoloris first has to know what your footage is. You tell it with Camera Input — your camera's log format — and it decodes that into the Working Space, the log space the whole chain runs in. Get this wrong and everything downstream is being asked to grade the wrong picture.
2. Balance. Before any film is involved, you set the scene straight: white balance with Temperature and Tint — a gel on the lens, in the units lighting gels and CC filters are sold in — and exposure in stops. This is the scene-referred correction. It is where neutrals become neutral.
3. The negative. The balanced scene is exposed onto a Stock (Negative) — the film stock whose color character the image takes on, plus its contrast, its toe and its shoulder.
4. The print. The negative is printed onto release stock, which is where most of film's contrast and color signature actually comes from. This is also where the lab-timing controls live: printer lights and print timing. Stages 3 and 4 share one switch, Film Look, and it ships off, so you balance first and then turn the film on.
5. Texture and damage. Everything a real strip of film picks up on its way to a screen: grain, halation, emulsion sharpness, adjacency, dye clouds, dirt, gate weave, flicker, archival fade, plus the optical stages that happen at the lens — vignette and diffusion.
6. Output. The finished picture is delivered into whatever standard you are working in — Rec.709, P3, HDR, sRGB, or left in log for you to grade downstream. An imported LUT of your own, if you use one, runs last of all.
The panel follows the work. Under the first three rows come Setup (once per project), See (the Scope and Show menus and the skin picker), Balance (Temperature, Tint, Exposure), Look (Film Look, the stock and its two faders) and Texture (the Grain, Halation, Film Sharpness and Gate Weave switches) — and then the deep controls in twirled-down groups underneath, in chain order, ending with Presets, LUTs & Export.
And one habit ties the whole panel together: diagnose the stage, correct at the stage. The taps and readouts exist to tell you which stage owns a problem — and every control family has its owning stage. Balance owns the input, the stock and print own the look, the texture stages own the surface. Find where it broke; fix it there.
Make neutrals neutral, put skin at the right brightness, then let the skin line arbitrate. In practice:
Step 1 — neutrals. Set Camera Input to your camera's format. Decoloris opens with Film Look off, so what you see is your footage after Balance — balance it now, before the film is on. Footage shot with the camera's white balance set to match the light is already neutral, and Temperature and Tint at 0 change nothing, so leave them there. If it isn't neutral, set Scope to Vectorscope and set Temperature and Tint by eye, or drag the Balance Wheel (see How do I use the Balance Wheel?). The quote at the vectorscope's top right (and Show → Skin Analysis) prints the Temperature and Tint settings that would make this frame's brightest areas neutral: a reading to check against, not an answer, and never written for you. With a face in frame, the vectorscope gives you the target: balance until the skin X sits on the skin line at about 80–110%, angle near 0 (see How do I read the skin numbers on the vectorscope?). If you balanced with the wheel, set Handle back to Skin Picker to save it.
Step 2 — exposure. Keep Show on Skin Analysis. The bottom band of that overlay prints where the skin in the frame landed, in stops relative to 18 percent gray — the same stops Exposure is dialed in. Move Exposure until skin sits where you want it. The classic exposure zone is roughly a stop above mid-gray; Show set to Exposure (stops) draws that band on its ladder for you. The overlay measures, it never dials anything for you.
Step 3 — turn the film on, then correct at the print. In this order:
If the frame holds more than one person, a face on sand, or anything else skin-colored, tick Use Skin Picker and put the point anywhere on the face you are grading, so the reading is that face, not the frame average.
A worked example, at Print Strength 60. A child in bamboo shade, shot on Sony S-Log3, graded at Print Strength 60, a stronger print than the shipped 30. With Film Look off, Temperature and Tint put skin at +0 85%. Film Look on read +4 122%: richer, and a touch toward yellow. Skin Analysis suggested R+3.5 B−3.4. Dialing about half of it, R+1.5 B−1.5, landed +2 95%: back in the natural range, with some of the film's warmth kept on the face. At the shipped 30 the jump is much smaller: a similar S-Log3 face went from 86% to 103% with Film Look on at 30, against 116% at 60, so at 30 that face stayed inside the natural range.
Read the numbers as a gauge, not a to-do list. On a well-balanced shot they show how your stock and print render skin. That is the look, and it will not read zero. Use them to match shots (the same face should read about the same numbers across a scene) and to compare stocks. To move the print on purpose, set the Printer Lights toward the values shown. They are settings, not amounts to add, and a typical trim is 1–3 points. If skin simply looks wrong, go back to Step 1: the lights can't rescue an unbalanced input. And remember what success looks like on this screen: stable non-zero numbers. Zero belongs at Step 1; character belongs to the print; chasing these numbers to zero just removes the look you chose from skin. Once one shot looks right, matching the rest of the scene to it is mechanical — see How do I match skin from shot to shot?
Two honest limits on step 3, and they matter. The correction is solved through the color stages only — grain, halation, diffusion and the other texture stages sit outside the calculation — so treat the number as a measured starting point and then judge the picture. And when the solve won't stand behind its answer, the readout says so in a word rather than showing you a wrong number: NO SKIN, NO FIT, OUT OF RANGE, or NOT UNIFORM.
Try this: do steps 1 and 2 with Film Look off and Scope on Vectorscope. The scope always reads the picture you deliver, so with the film off it is a plain balance scope for your source. Then tick Film Look and go to step 3. Don't drag the amber dot to the center to "fix" a shot: the center only means no correction. Judge by the skin X and its numbers.
Yes. One Decoloris on each clip does the correction; one on an adjustment layer (Premiere) or a timeline or group post-clip node (Resolve) does the film look. Set up as below, the pair gives the same picture as one Decoloris with the same settings. For a handful of shots, one Decoloris per clip is simpler.
On each clip: set Camera Input to your camera, turn Film Look off, and set Output to Log (working space). The clip will look flat. That is correct: it is handing its work to the look.
On the look: set Camera Input to None (no camera decode), turn Film Look on, and type your camera's ceiling into Ceiling % (Manual), for example 3842 for Sony S-Log3, 228 for DJI D-Log-M or 100 for Rec.709 (full table in What do Auto Camera Range and Ceiling % (Manual) do?).
On both: keep the same Working Space. A mismatch shifts the whole frame, and nothing on screen warns you.
Where each module goes:
Gate Weave matches only on the clip, and there it doesn't shake titles below the look. Grain, Halation, Diffusion, Film Sharpness and the Print match only on the look. Chroma Denoise belongs on the clip: on a timeline layer its temporal pass would see across your cuts.
Don't hand off in Rec.709. Leaving the clip's Output on Rec.709 and the look's Camera Input on Rec.709 seems to work, but on log footage the clip squashes your highlights to display white before the film sees them. You lose the film's highlight roll-off and halation, and the highlights are tone mapped twice.
Good to know:
Check one frame first. Before you commit a project to this setup, compare one frame against a one-Decoloris grade of the same shot. Host setups vary: an 8-bit sequence, clips scaled in Motion (Premiere runs clip effects before Motion) or color management between Resolve nodes can all change what reaches the look.
Three rows sit above everything: Master Strength, Camera Input and Output. Directly under Output is the Setup group — its label reads Setup - decoloris.com/faq, the address of this guide — holding Working Space, Auto Camera Range, Ceiling % (Manual), Film Gauge, Skin Hue Width, High Quality and Show Tone Curves, which you set once per project. Below Setup the everyday controls run in the order you work:
Then the deep groups in chain order, from Exposure & Contrast and Print down to Local Contrast, and last of all Presets, LUTs & Export. In Premiere every group opens collapsed; click a group's name to open it.
It fades the entire Decoloris look in and out as one control. At 100 you get the full look. At 0 you get your original image with only the camera decode and the output transform applied — your color management stays intact, the look simply isn't there. It sits on top of every module's own enable and strength rather than replacing them, so nothing you dialed is lost while you fade. It is not the same control as Stock Strength, which fades the Film Stock module alone. At 0 the picture matches the shipped Neutral (Verified) preset — decode in, output out, no look — so that preset and this fader at zero are two routes to the same reference frame.
Try this: park Master Strength on a keyboard-reachable value and flick 100 → 0 → 100 as your A/B. It is the only true whole-look bypass in the panel.
This tells Decoloris what your footage already is, so it can decode it into the working space. Set it to your camera's log format. If your clip is already in the working space — set by the Working Space popup, the first control in the Setup group below Output — leave it on None. This is the single largest lever on the first frame: a mis-set decode hands every stage below it the wrong picture, and no amount of grading downstream recovers that cleanly.
Try this: if a fresh apply looks wrong in a way you can't place — muddy top end, no highlights — check this popup before you touch anything else.
The shipped Camera Input menu, exactly as the panel lists it — alphabetical by manufacturer, None first:
None (no camera decode) · ACEScct / AP1 · Apple Log (iPhone) · Apple Log 2 (iPhone, AWG) · Arri Log C3 / AWG3 · Arri Log C4 / AWG4 · Blackmagic Gen 5 / BMD WG · Canon Log 2 / Cinema Gamut · Canon Log 3 / Cinema Gamut · DaVinci Wide Gamut · DJI D-Log (Mavic/Air/P4) · DJI D-Log-M (Pkt 3/Mini) · Fujifilm F-Log2 / F-Gamut · Insta360 I-Log · Nikon N-Log / N-Gamut · Panasonic V-Log / V-Gamut · Rec.709 normal (default) · Rec.2100 HLG (BT.2020) · Rec.2100 PQ (BT.2020) · RED Log3G10 / RWG (Nikon) · Sony S-Log2 / S-Gamut · Sony S-Log3 / SG3.Cine
Each entry decodes both the transfer function and its gamut. Camera and log-format names identify compatibility only — see the trademark note at the end of this document.
Output is the transform applied on the way out. Log (working space) leaves the image in the working space for your own downstream grade. Everything else delivers a finished, display-referred picture. The two Rec.709 entries are reference Rec.709 for a gamma 2.4 display, which is what a calibrated broadcast or grading monitor expects. In Premiere, turn on Display Color Management or the picture reads lifted on a desktop monitor — that is a host setting, not a plugin fault. Rec.709 (Gamma 2.4, Clip) applies no tone mapping at all and clips above legal white; for log camera sources use Rec.709 Tone Mapped (2.4) instead. Rec.2020 and P3-D65 are tone mapped the same way with their own primaries; Rec.2100 HLG and PQ are HDR and carry their own standard curves; sRGB (Web) is the clipping Rec.709 picture with the sRGB curve instead.
Try this: at a declared source range of 100 the two Rec.709 entries are identical; above 100 they diverge immediately. That is the cheapest way to see what tone mapping is doing.
ACEScct (AP1) is different in kind from the rest: it hands off scene-referred log for another application to grade and finish. It applies no tone mapping and no display curve, Ceiling % (Manual) does nothing on it, and LUT export is not available from it. DCI-P3 Theatrical (2.6) is the theatrical twin of P3-D65 — same primaries, same tone mapping, encoded for a projector calibrated to gamma 2.6. On an ordinary desktop monitor it will look dark and contrasty, and that is correct rather than a fault: judge it on a P3 projector or a display set to 2.6. LUT export is available from it, which is what a show LUT for a DI theater is.
It is the log space the whole chain runs in, and it is the first control in the Setup group. If Camera Input is set, your footage is decoded into this space first; if Camera Input is None, this is what your footage is assumed to already be. It decides what the chain receives and emits — not what the film does: the film stock's character, the Color Grade group, the Balance tints and the grain zones are all evaluated in one internal reference space, so a stock looks the same whichever working space you pick. It ships on ACEScct.
If Resolve's color management hands Decoloris your clips already in the timeline space (DaVinci Wide Gamut / Intermediate), set Camera Input to None and Working Space to DaVinci Wide Gamut. You need both, because None means "the footage is already in the Working Space." If your clips arrive as camera log (color management off), set Camera Input to your camera instead.
Nothing on the picture checks which log you picked: the COLOR SETUP MISMATCH strip compares scene against display, not one log against another. A wrong pairing looks like a plausible but slightly off grade, so check this once per project.
Decoloris compares what the host says its timeline is (scene-referred, meaning log or linear, or display-referred) with what you have set. The strip appears only when the host gives an answer, which in practice means Resolve with color management. Premiere doesn't report it reliably, so Decoloris stays silent there rather than guess.
It never changes anything for you. It names the disagreement, because Decoloris can't know which side you meant. While it shows, the scope stands down (DIAG BUSY), and like every on-picture mark it is in your render until you fix the setting.
They tell the tone map how much highlight your format actually carries. Auto Camera Range ships on and sets the number from the camera curve you picked. Most entries use the ceiling the camera's maker publishes, and Insta360 I-Log uses the figure in Insta360's own I-Log white paper. Four work differently. DJI D-Log-M has no maker figure and is derived from DJI's own conversion LUT; Nikon N-Log has none either and is read off the curve itself. HLG is anchored to its BT.2408 diffuse-white scale and PQ at 203 nits, matching the HDR output side.
Ceiling % (Manual) is the highlight ceiling: how bright your source can go, as a percentage of reference white. It is yours only with Auto Camera Range off; while Auto Camera Range is on, it is set for you and your changes are ignored. On Camera Input None it is always yours. It does nothing when Output is Log, ACEScct or Rec.709 (Gamma 2.4, Clip).
Typing a high ceiling: in Premiere and After Effects the slider stops at 10000, but you can type up to 50000. In Resolve the slider runs to 50000. The values Auto Camera Range uses, by Camera Input entry (whole numbers are close enough):
ACEScct / AP1 22286 · Apple Log 1200 · Apple Log 2 1200 · Arri Log C3 5508 · Arri Log C4 46980 · Blackmagic Gen 5 22286 · Canon Log 2 5923 · Canon Log 3 1467 · DaVinci Wide Gamut 10000 · DJI D-Log 2175 · DJI D-Log-M 228 · Fujifilm F-Log2 5825 · Insta360 I-Log 2200 · Nikon N-Log 1478 · Panasonic V-Log 1622 · Rec.709 100 · Rec.2100 HLG 377 · Rec.2100 PQ 4926 · RED Log3G10 18432 · Sony S-Log2 1376 · Sony S-Log3 3842
Try this: the shipped 2000 is the highest setting that still leaves middle gray exactly where the film chain put it. Raising it holds more highlight range; lowering it gives a punchier picture.
It is the film gauge being emulated. Smaller gauges magnify the negative more, so grain, halation, dye structure, sharpness and dirt all get coarser relative to the frame as you move from 35mm to Super 16 to Super 8. Grain grows by less than the rest: 1.2 times on Super 16 and 1.47 times on Super 8, against about 2 and 4.3 times for the other modules. Note the first entry is 35mm (Super 35) specifically — the aperture the whole tree scales by is Super 35, which is 13 percent wider than an Academy gate, so if you are matching Academy-gate material, know that going in.
How wide a band of hues the skin overlay paints as skin — it widens the overlay's paint, not the skin in your picture. It sets the false color only — the width of the hue window around the reference chip that the Skin Analysis overlay (on the Show menu) tints. It does not affect the numbers that overlay prints, and the paint always stays frame-wide even when the skin picker is directing the numbers at one face. Because it changes the picture without changing the frame, the overlay prints it whenever it is off its default: the bottom band reads SKIN WIDTH and this slider's number, so a screenshot records the setting it was read at. Nothing here touches the rendered image.
It is on by default; leave it on. Turning it off makes previews a little faster and never changes the look: it only sets how many samples the halation bloom takes, and both settings land on the same picture within one 8-bit code. Your host may lower it while you scrub; your delivered render always uses the full setting.
It draws a second, separate box plotting the plugin's own transfer curves — what the film stock, the print, the fade and the dye cloud together do to tone at the Output. It looks at no pixels at all. Every other reading in the panel is a measurement of your frame; this one is a picture of the controls, evaluated through the same chain the .cube exporter bakes, so what you see here and what an exported LUT does cannot disagree. That also makes it free — sixty-four evaluations of a curve, at any resolution — so leaving it on costs nothing measurable. It draws four strokes — red, green, blue, and the neutral in white on top — so a chain that leaves grays gray reads as one white line, and any color separation you can see between the strokes is the amount the chain is putting there. Use it to understand what a control does to the shape of the tone rather than to judge a frame: pull Exposure or the Printer Lights and watch the whole curve slide; pull Fade and watch the toe lift off the floor. It is independent of the Scope menu and sits in a corner the scope isn't in, so both boxes can be up at once; it stands down (and says DIAG BUSY) while a Show entry owns the picture. It is a study tool for the deep-color reader, not a grading scope, which is why it sits at the end of Setup. Like every overlay, it will be in your export if you leave it on.
Internal identifiers, not picture controls — please do not edit them. The plugin writes them when you load a LUT; together they are a fingerprint of the LUT file's contents. If you do change one by hand you will not break anything: a value matching no LUT in your imported folder is simply skipped and the rest of the effect renders normally, and a value that happens to match another LUT you have imported will load that one instead. Use Load LUT... rather than typing here. (Skin X % and Skin Y % are the same kind of internal value: the plugin writes them to remember where the skin picker sits. To move the picker, move the Sample Point.)
Scope draws one instrument into the picture: Off (the default), RGB Parade, Waveform, Vectorscope or Histogram. It always reads the Output — the picture you deliver, in whatever Output is set to, live after Balance and after the film look. Your host's own scopes read the same place; what this one adds is that it is drawn inside the plugin, beside the readouts that explain it, and that the vectorscope carries Decoloris's own skin reference and the Balance Wheel.
The traces are density traces: brighter where more of the picture sits, so the mass of the image stands out from stray pixels. The plate behind them is translucent, so the picture shows through the box while the traces, text and scales stay fully legible. On the vectorscope each sample is drawn in its own hue, with a white core where it is densest.
On the vectorscope:
Yes, if you leave it on. The overlay is drawn into the frame by the render, and there is deliberately no preview-only mode: a readout that looked different depending on your viewer quality would be a readout you could not compare against itself. The amber DIAG badge at top center is there to tell you a diagnostic is live. The box sits in the corner set by Scope Position (bottom right by default) at 47 percent of picture width, and it does not draw at all below about 189 pixels of delivered width, so a tiny thumbnail shows no box rather than an illegible one. It also stands down entirely while another diagnostic is reading the frame — any Show entry, or the working-space warning (the COLOR SETUP MISMATCH strip) — because those answer narrower questions and win. When that happens the frame says DIAG BUSY rather than showing you nothing, so a scope that does not appear is never a mystery; set Show back to Off and the scope comes back.
It picks the corner the scope sits in: Bottom Right (the default), Bottom Left, Top Right or Top Left. Move it off the face you're judging; the scope reads the whole frame wherever it sits. While the wheel cue shows at top center (WHEEL MODE or BALANCE OFF), a top-corner scope drops to the bottom corner on the same side, and a top-corner scope never covers the DIAG badge. Show Tone Curves uses a corner the scope isn't in. Presets don't carry Scope Position; copy and paste does.
You can, but the scopes are built for a paused frame. Each trace is drawn from about two million samples taken at the same places in the frame at every playback size, and the readouts (the T/M quote, the skin numbers, CLIP, GAMUT and the rest) use a fixed grid too, so a paused frame reads the same at full, half and quarter resolution. The cost is render time while a scope is on: playback slows by a fraction of a second per UHD frame. With Scope on Off, nothing slows down. Park, read, adjust, play.
Four instruments. The menu opens on Off.
Waveform and Histogram have a ruler in a margin the data never covers, so you can place skin at 65 or hold a shadow at 5 by number. The transfer-curve plot is the Show Tone Curves checkbox in Setup.
The two numbers outside the disc, where the skin line leaves it, describe the skin X.
The first number is the angle, in whole degrees, between the skin and the skin line. Plus is toward yellow (and on past it, green); minus is toward red (and on past it, magenta). As a guide:
The second number is chroma: how far the skin sits from neutral, as a percentage of Decoloris's own reference skin color. As a guide:
Where that sits on the scope. 100% is about a third of the way from the center to the 75% red and yellow targets, so skin usually lives about 25–35% of the way out toward them. Darker complexions can read somewhat higher, and complexions differ, as they should.
These bands are a guide, not a standard. The reference skin color is Decoloris's own, chosen by eye. Where it sits on the scope is measured (127.7°), but the color itself is a visual choice, not an industry standard, and the conventional skin line other scopes draw sits two to twelve degrees away from it. Use the numbers to steer and to match shots; judge the face.
A few habits:
The numbers measure; they never dial anything for you. For the exposure of the same skin, use Show → Skin Analysis (see What does Skin Analysis tell me?). If the percentage runs high, see The vectorscope says skin saturation is high.
The Scope always reads what you deliver. Two recipes give you the earlier views:
To see skin before the film, switch Film Look off; to see it after the stock and print, switch it on. Flipping Film Look is how you route a problem to its owning stage (see The vectorscope says skin saturation is high).
Use Skin Picker turns it on; Sample Point is where it reads. It's a face picker: it chooses which face the skin readings describe. With it on, the skin readings read the whole face the point is on — every pixel connected to the point whose color matches the face's own — instead of the whole frame. It uses the same averaging as the whole-frame reading, just on that one face, so moving the point around on the face doesn't change the numbers. The point is trusted: wherever you put it is taken to be skin, so a face under colored stage light reads too.
Use it in this order:
It is not an eyedropper. With the picker on, the Temperature and Tint band on Skin Analysis still shows the whole frame's cast, because a face is not a gray card. To balance off a gray card or a white shirt, read the frame with the picker off.
What it covers: Skin Analysis's stops and printer lights (while the print is live), the middle band of its strip (which shows the face's own average color, directly above the skin chip it aims at), and the vectorscope's skin X. Decoloris draws a crosshair and a small dot on every point of the picture the reading was taken from, on the skin view and the vectorscope, in every host — so you see exactly what was measured. Point at sand and you will see the dots on the sand.
Moving it: drag the crosshair in the viewer, or type the Sample Point's X/Y. The shipped position is centered, 40 percent down from the top — where a face usually sits, and clear of Premiere's Motion anchor at the frame center. In Premiere, click the Decoloris name in Effect Controls first, so the effect is selected, then drag the handle in the Program Monitor. If the whole picture slides instead, Premiere grabbed the clip's Motion anchor: reset Motion, click Decoloris again and drag. If you applied Decoloris to the source (master) clip rather than the clip in the timeline, its handle appears in the Source Monitor — drag it there. In DaVinci Resolve, ticking Use Skin Picker puts a ringed handle in the viewer; the viewer passes your mouse to the plug-in only when its on-screen control menu (bottom left of the viewer) is set to Open FX Overlay, and one drag is one undo.
Handle sets what the point drags: Skin Picker (the default, everything above) or Balance Wheel, which turns the same handle into the pen for white balance — see How do I use the Balance Wheel?
Good to know:
Show picks the one measurement overlay to draw. Off is the default.
Exposure (stops) and Skin Analysis let the whole chain run and measure the picture you deliver: with Film Look off that is the plate after Balance; with it on, it is after the stock and print. To see the skin before the look, switch Film Look off. It is one menu, so it shows one reading at a time. Nothing on it is ever written into your controls for you.
Three things, in bands down a strip at the side of the frame.
The top band quotes ONE correction, chosen by where you are. While the print is live (Film Look on and Print Strength above 0) it quotes the Printer Lights in the Print group. Otherwise it quotes Temperature and Tint — the controls that can fix the cast before there is a print to time.
The middle band is a gray chip — or, with the picker on, the face's own average color directly above the skin chip it aims at.
The bottom band is where skin landed on the exposure scale, in stops relative to 18 percent gray — the same stops Exposure is dialed in. It keeps reading even while the top band refuses.
Skin Analysis always reads the picture you deliver.
Use it with the vectorscope. Skin Analysis gives you skin's exposure and the one correction to make; the vectorscope's skin numbers ("+2 95%") give you its hue and saturation (see How do I read the skin numbers on the vectorscope?). The order: with Film Look off, balance until skin sits on the line at about 80–110%; tick Film Look and read again; then correct what the print did at the Printer Lights this band quotes, dialing all of the quote or part of it to taste (see What's the fastest way to get a shot balanced properly?).
With Film Look on, it tells you, in printer points, how the stock and print moved this face's color. Red and blue move while green holds, as a lab timer quotes it. It shows the setting to dial into the Printer Lights (Print group), not an amount to add.
Three rules:
What the numbers are. The quote is the full correction that would put this face back on the reference skin color, worked out from neutral lights. It is an absolute setting, so it does not count down as you dial: set half of it and it still shows the whole. Dialing all of it takes the film's character off skin; dialing part of it keeps some, and that is a taste choice. Raising a light takes that color out of the print, and lowering it adds that color, so a quote like R+3.5 B−3.4 takes red out and adds blue: it cools skin that the stock and print warmed. Check the result on the vectorscope's skin numbers (see How do I read the skin numbers on the vectorscope?); the worked example in What's the fastest way to get a shot balanced properly? dials about half.
Limits: the solve covers the color stages only. Grain, halation, diffusion and the other texture stages are outside it, so treat the number as a starting point and judge the picture. Don't use Temperature or Tint to fix what the print did: they act before the film, so they re-balance the whole scene to fix one face — which is why the quote switches to the Printer Lights once the print is live. Order matters too: lights set before the input is honest chase a moving target. Once you dial the setting it shows, the reading holds still — solve again at those lights and it shows the same numbers. If the face needs more than the ±12-point range of the dials, it says OUT OF RANGE instead of a number: go back to Temperature and Tint.
So here is the rule to keep, because this screen is misread in exactly one way: on Skin Analysis with Film Look on, stable non-zero numbers are success, not error. Zero belongs upstream, on the balance side. Character belongs to the print. And the output numbers are how you keep that character consistent from shot to shot.
Fix Temperature + Tint first. Adjust printer lights to taste. Then match with other shots.
1. Balance. Temperature and Tint on every shot, with Film Look off, until skin sits on the vectorscope's skin line at about 80–110% (see How do I read the skin numbers on the vectorscope?). The Skin Analysis quote is a setting, so when the dials match it, it holds still rather than reading zero.
2. Grade the hero. Film Look on, printer lights to taste on your best shot. Its Skin Analysis numbers — the R/B points and the stops line — are now your match target.
3. Match. On every other shot of that subject: skin picker on the same face (re-place the point on every pasted shot: a pasted point stays where it was in the frame), then drive the readout to the hero's numbers. Temperature and Tint for the bulk, printer trims for the last fraction.
Don't chase zeros. The stable non-zero numbers ARE the target — zeroing them strips your look off skin.
The fine print, for when you have more than ten seconds:
A wrong number is worse than none, so the readouts refuse with a word:
The exposure line keeps working even while the printer-light line refuses. PRINT OFF appears only on the Stock Curves map: when the print isn't live, Skin Analysis and the vectorscope quote Temperature and Tint instead.
Range Check (on the Show menu) marks two things on the picture at once, as diagonal white-and-black hatches running opposite ways so you can tell them apart.
The first hatch — out of range for your Output. Every pixel the output limit actually moved: your Output is held inside the range its own encoding is defined on, and this shows where a frame sat outside it. A run that leads with its white band was too bright and was pulled back from the ceiling; one that leads with its black band was too dark and was lifted off the floor. Hue and brightness did not move; saturation did. Small fringes on neon, LEDs or specular hits are the limiter doing its job, so leave them. Marks covering a face, a sky or a whole costume mean the picture is arriving too saturated for the space you are delivering to, and the fix is upstream — Exposure, the Printer Lights, the saturation controls (Source Saturation, the Color Grade group, Saturation Trim), or a wider Output. On Log and ACEScct outputs nothing is limited, so this half reads LOG OUTPUT under a DIAG RANGE badge.
It renders into your export if you leave it on, and it stands aside while the scope owns the picture.
What it's for: a one-glance check that Camera Input matches your footage.
What it marks: camera over-range — any pixel that decodes to more light than your Working Space can hold. There is no threshold; the rule is exact.
Why pixels get marked:
Ceilings, in stops over mid-gray: DaVinci Wide Gamut 9.1 · Arri Log C3 8.3 · Arri Log C4 11.4 · ACEScct 10.3 · RED Log3G10 10.0 · Blackmagic Film Gen 5 10.3.
What it can't see: a gamut mistake that shrinks color. Rec.2020 read as Rec.709 just looks less saturated. It checks the curve, not the primaries — and it reads the decode, not the output. On the shipped Rec.709 Camera Input the decode stays well inside every working space, so expect no marks there: this half is for log sources. On Camera Input None nothing is decoded, so it reads NO DECODE under DIAG RANGE. When it is marking, the top-right corner says how much: OVER gives the share of tested pixels that decode out of range, and the line under it gives how many pixels were tested (it samples every 8th row and column).
Diagnose the stage, correct at the stage — Film Look tells you which stage owns it.
1. Degrees first. A warm cast inflates chroma. Fix Temperature and Tint, and the percentage often falls on its own.
2. Stops next. Darker-exposed skin reads relatively more chromatic — check the exposure band before blaming saturation.
3. Flip Film Look.
100 percent is a reference, not a ceiling. The violation numbers live on the caption band — rich-stock skin above 100 can simply be the look. About 110–130% reads warm and rich; above about 130% starts to read orange or waxy (see How do I read the skin numbers on the vectorscope?).
It turns the white-balance and exposure stage on. This is the scene-referred correction that happens before any film emulation runs. It ships on, because a scene that has not been set straight is not a scene the film stage can do anything sensible with. Unticked, Temperature, Tint, Exposure and the Exposure & Contrast controls do nothing, so changing any of them ticks Balance back on for you; so does switching Handle to Balance Wheel. One undo (Ctrl+Z) takes back both the change and the tick. To see the plate before Balance on the scope, untick it, look, and tick it again.
Balance one shot by eye. Copy it to the rest. Re-place the point and trim each.
Then turn Film Look on and match skin across the scene (see How do I match skin from shot to shot?). Using one Decoloris per clip and one for the timeline? Watch the look copy's scope while you balance on the clip copy (see Can I use one Decoloris per clip and one for the whole timeline?). Everything you set is on the panel; nothing is stored behind your back.
They are the white balance: a gel on the lens, applied to the whole scene before anything else in the chain runs, so the film look downstream treats the gelled scene as what was in front of the lens.
0 and 0 change nothing, and that is where they ship. Footage shot with the camera's white balance set to match the light is already neutral, so leave them there. Use them to fix a scene that is too warm or too cool — Temperature for warm-cool, Tint for green-magenta such as fluorescent or LED spill — or to warm a scene on purpose. Two things help you set them: the T/M quote on the vectorscope and on Skin Analysis (a reading you type in, never written for you), and the Balance Wheel, which you drag on the vectorscope.
Try this: you don't need to know what the light was. Dial until neutrals read neutral; the number you land on is the gel the scene needed.
The Balance Wheel lets you balance by dragging on the vectorscope. The amber dot on the vectorscope is where a white in your scene lands after Temperature and Tint; drag it, and the picture follows live.
In Premiere Pro and After Effects:
While Handle is Balance Wheel, the Temperature and Tint rows keep their last values; the handle's place is the balance. Typing into them or loading a preset moves the handle onto the new values. To cancel, drag the handle off the wheel's circle: the picture goes back to the Temperature and Tint values. Keyframes on Temperature and Tint are not followed while Handle is Balance Wheel. With Balance unticked, the handle moves but grades nothing, and the top center says BALANCE OFF / TICK BALANCE TO GRADE.
In DaVinci Resolve: set Scope to Vectorscope and drag the amber dot in the viewer (the viewer's on-screen control menu must be on Open FX Overlay). The drag writes Temperature and Tint directly, as one undo, and the CLIP readout shows whenever the vectorscope is on. The dot and the Sample Point each have their own handle there, so Resolve shows Handle for reference only.
One honest limit: the dot follows the white through the working space and the Output only. With Film Look on, its direction is approximate — the live picture, and the skin X on the scope, are the truth.
Overall exposure in stops, applied at the head of the chain, right after the Temperature and Tint gel. This is the scene-referred exposure correction — the equivalent of having stopped up or down on the day — not a display-side brightness trim. Everything downstream, including where the film stock's toe and shoulder land, follows from it.
Film Look is one switch for the film stock and the print together. Decoloris opens with Film Look off, so you can balance first. Tick Film Look to see your stock and print; your film settings are kept while it's off. Off is exactly Stock Strength and Print Strength at zero: the picture is your camera image after Balance, through the Output. On brings back the stock and print exactly as you set them. There is no separate Film Stock or Print checkbox; to see one without the other, set the other's strength to 0.
These controls act only through Film Look: Stock (Negative), Stock Strength, Print Strength, Light R / G / B, Hold Mid-Gray, Highlight Print Strength, Push/Pull (stops) and the Film Stock trims. Changing any of them in the panel ticks Film Look on for you, so a stock you pick is a stock you see. One undo (Ctrl+Z) takes back both the change and the tick.
Try this: flick Film Look off and on to compare the balanced plate with the finished look — and to read Skin Analysis before and after the film.
It is the film stock whose color character the image takes on. The menu is a list of camera negatives, and the label says so because it is not a list of finished looks — the print stage below is what develops them. Two entries are marked because they are not camera negatives: Teatro 2383 (print) is a print emulsion and Vivezza 50 (reversal) is a transparency. Noir 5222 and Noir 5231 are black and white silver stocks: they convert the image to monochrome inside the stock character, so grain, halation and print all then run on a mono image, and with the follower stocks left on Match Stock their halation goes neutral too — a silver emulsion has no dye layers to color it. Nocturne 200T is a finer-grained, sharper 3200K stock than Vesper 500T.
It blends the Film Stock module against your untouched image — its color character and its curve trims, and nothing else. It does not touch Balance, Print, Grain or any other module. On Noir 5222 or Noir 5231 it cannot bring the color back, because those stocks' monochrome conversion is part of the stock itself, not part of what this fader blends. It reaches the picture only while Film Look is on.
It blends the printed result against the negative, from 0 to 100. Lower it for a flatter, more negative-like image; 100 is a fully developed print. At 0 there is no print at all, which also sends the negative's grain and dirt back to their pre-curve positions. The two faders sit next to each other and do different jobs: the one above dials the film stock's character, this one dials the print. Like Stock Strength, it reaches the picture only while Film Look is on — and Print Strength at 0 is how you see the stock without the print. It ships at 30, a gentle Film Look out of the box: skin stays near natural and shaded faces keep more exposure. Raise it for a stronger print.
The switch turns film grain on. The grain is a physical emulsion model, so its size and structure follow the Film Gauge and the Grain Stock rather than being a fixed noise overlay. Grain Amount is a scaler, not an absolute: 100 percent is whatever your chosen Grain Stock calls for, so a coarse stock stays coarser than a fine one at the same setting. It is live in every mode, including Match Stock. At 0 the grain is off without touching the switch.
The switch turns halation on: on color negative, the red-biased glow real film gets when bright light passes through the emulsion, reflects off the back of the base and re-exposes it from behind (on the two Noir stocks the halo is neutral, and under Print Halation Physical on 2383 it is blue-violet — the print's layers run the other way). Halation Amount scales against your Halation Stock's calibrated glow, where 100 percent is that stock's amount. The response is steep rather than proportional — 200 percent is much more than twice, and 50 percent much less than half. At 0 the main glow is gone, but Halation Aura and Halation Fog are separate lobes and keep whatever you dialed into them.
It turns on the emulsion's sharpness model: the slight softening a real film layer applies, different for each color record. (MTF, modulation transfer function, is the optics term for how much fine detail a layer keeps.) It is off by default and it is the master switch for everything in the Film Sharpness (MTF) group below, including the print's own optics. It softens the same way at every preview size (see Does a lower playback resolution change the look?).
The switch turns on gate weave: the small frame-to-frame wander of film through a camera or projector gate. Weave (% of frame) is the weave amount: how far the frame wanders, as a percentage of the frame's long edge — and the numbers are honest about how small real weave is. The slider tops out at 0.5, half a percent of the frame's long edge, because that is already a badly worn projector; the shipped 0.075 is under a tenth of a percent, which is the scale at which film feels alive without you spotting why. Small numbers read as life, large ones read as a worn projector. The frame is moved with a sharp resampling filter, so fine detail doesn't soften or pump as it weaves.
The white-balance and exposure dials themselves sit near the top of the panel, under Balance (see Part 1). This group holds the scene-side shaping controls that run with them, before any film.
Contrast works about the working space's mid-gray: below 1 flattens, above 1 steepens, and mid-gray itself does not move. Contrast Pivot moves the point the contrast turns about, measured in log code — across its travel that is roughly three and a half to four and a half stops depending on working space. Negative pivots low, so contrast opens up the shadows; positive pivots high and holds the highlights. The pivot only acts when Contrast is not 1. Contrast ships at 1, so on a fresh instance Contrast Pivot does nothing at all until you move Contrast.
Saturation before any film emulation, measured about neutral log luma. 1 leaves the image alone; 0 makes it monochrome. The name says its job: this is the source's saturation — the correction tier, run before the film stock has done anything. Shape the look's saturation in the Color Grade group instead; trim the stock's own in Film Stock.
They are a warm-cool split tone applied before the film stock. Shadow Warmth warms or cools the shadows only, fading out as the image gets brighter; Highlight Warmth is its counterpart at the top end. Positive goes amber, negative goes blue on both. These are a warm-cool axis, not green-magenta — for green-magenta use Tint. Both are measured in the chain's reference log, so the same setting is the same shift in every working space. Unlike Temperature, which gels the whole scene, these split the warmth by tone.
A lift in the blacks from light scattering inside the lens. It is added in linear light before the film, as a percentage of mid-gray, and barely touches the highlights.
The group's label reads Print - timing in points. It sits second among the groups, straight after Exposure & Contrast, because it is where you finish a balanced shot. The print's on/off is Film Look, and its strength is Print Strength, both at the top of the panel.
There isn't a separate one. Film Look (at the top of the panel) turns the film stock and the print on together, and the print is Teatro 2383 release stock, which is where most of film's contrast and color signature actually comes from. To see the stock without the print, leave Film Look on and set Print Strength to 0. Everything in this group acts only while the print is live: Film Look on and Print Strength above 0.
A printer point is the unit lab color timers work in. The controls are Light R (+cyan), Light G (+magenta) and Light B (+yellow), in points.
Try this: steer with these last. Set white balance at Balance before the stock — Temperature and Tint, which also fix a large overall cast — and use the Printer Lights for what the stock and print did to skin. With Film Look on, Skin Analysis reads that correction out for you in these same points, as the setting to dial rather than an amount to add — solved for the face under the skin picker when it is on. If the correction runs big, the fix is upstream at Temperature and Tint.
It lab-times the print so mid gray comes out where it went in, the way a lab times every release print to an aim density (lab term: LAD, Laboratory Aim Density). On, the print changes contrast and color without also darkening the whole frame, and it holds mid gray at every Print Strength. Off is the untimed print, which sinks the picture by about a sixth of a stop at Print Strength 60. It does not change the print stock itself: deep shadows still fall away, and the slope you measure at a given exposure does shift slightly, because timing a print slides it along a curve. Leave it on unless you are comparing the two.
It takes the print to full strength in the bright highlights only, so you can tame a blown sun or a specular without paying for it in the shadows. Below about three and a half stops over mid gray it does nothing at all, and that is exact rather than approximate. Around 50 removes the hard clip and the green-yellow fringe a clipped highlight develops; 100 overshoots and the highlight goes cool. It has no effect when Print Strength is already at 100, because there is no headroom left for it to take. And, plainly: it cannot bring back detail that was never recorded. A clipped source is a flat plateau; this changes how that plateau and its edge render, not what is inside them.
It leaves the silver in the print instead of bleaching it out. Contrast climbs, blacks go dense and color drains, in the way the real process does. 0 is a normal print and turns it off; it acts on its own, with no other switch.
Light spatial cleanup of the digital plate, before the film chain adds its own texture. It leads with color noise, which is the half that can be smoothed safely; luma is left alone unless you ask for it. Degrain-before-regrain is standard compositing practice and this is that step, scoped small. It is not a replacement for a dedicated noise reducer on badly degraded footage — do not buy it as a rescue tool.
You set it by hand with three sliders. Tick Chroma Denoise and it starts at Noise Level 2.5, Shadow Bias 0 and Gain Share 0.31. Raise Noise Level until color noise in flat areas is gone, and stop before color starts to bleed on fine detail.
The expected noise level at mid-gray, as a percentage of mid-gray: the noise per pixel at your project's full resolution. At reduced playback resolution (1/2, 1/4, Resolve proxies) Decoloris reads the scale from the host and adjusts to match, so the preview shows what the full-resolution render will. Too low leaves noise; too high smears detail. It also sets how far a neighboring frame may differ before the temporal filter stops trusting it, so setting it too high makes moving objects trail too. Range 0.5–15; it starts at 2.5.
Shadow Bias shifts the noise model toward read noise, which is constant, and away from shot noise, which follows exposure. Raise it when the shadows are the noisy part; it starts at 0. Gain Share sets how much of the noise is treated as a fixed gain term rather than as exposure-dependent; it starts at 0.31. Together with Noise Level, these are the whole noise model: nothing is estimated from the footage.
Chroma Strength is the main control. Color noise is the ugly half and the safe half to remove hard, so it sits at full strength by default; lower it if saturated fine detail starts to bleed. It doesn't bleed strong color across an edge where the two sides are the same brightness (red lips into skin, a painted wall against its own shadow), because the cleanup judges a neighboring pixel on its color as well as its brightness. Luma Smoothing smooths the luminance channel as well, and it is off by default, deliberately: pushed luma smoothing is what makes footage look waxy, skin first. Raise it a little only if gray noise still reads after Chroma Strength has done its work.
Temporal (Full Res) is temporal denoise: it compares each frame with its neighbors, so still areas get cleaner without losing detail. Moving areas are left alone, so nothing smears. It is a slider, and it sets how much of that cleanup to apply, to luma and color together: full strength is the shipped default, and at 0 the temporal pass is off and no neighboring frames are fetched.
It only runs at full resolution — that is what "(Full Res)" in the label says. Below full playback or render resolution, Premiere and After Effects don't send neighboring frames, so a reduced-resolution preview can differ from your export. At full resolution it runs whether the clip is playing or paused, so Full-resolution playback of a denoised clip fetches neighboring frames and may play more slowly.
It can't see edits. On an adjustment layer or a timeline node, the frames across a cut belong to another shot, so apply Decoloris to the clip instead. It also adds export time, because the neighboring frames have to be built too.
Temporal Frames is how many frames it compares: 3 means one on each side, 11 means five. More frames clean more, with diminishing returns: 11 is about twice as effective as 3, not five times. The cost grows with every frame. At 11, exports run several times slower and need about 4.8 GB of GPU memory at 8K, and if the card runs short, Decoloris quietly uses fewer frames — which can look like the control doing nothing. Start at 3.
Temporal (Full Res) is how much of the result to use. Lowering it above 0 doesn't make rendering faster — the neighboring frames are still built and fetched. Use it when something real is being cleaned away, like a spark or a monitor flicker — a single-frame event small enough to look like grain: half strength removes half as much.
Try this: if that flicker is the shot, pull Temporal (Full Res) down rather than narrowing the window.
Both are readouts drawn over the picture (set Show to Noise Reading or Temporal Status), and neither changes the render underneath. Each says MODULE OFF with Chroma Denoise switched off. Noise Reading prints the settings the denoiser is running on: NOISE LVL (Noise Level) with AT FULL RES under it, GAIN SHR (Gain Share) and BIAS (Shadow Bias). It measures nothing on the frame, so it reads the same at every playback size, and a screenshot records the settings a shot was graded at. Temporal Status prints what the temporal pass did: the window, how many neighbors were used out of how many were asked for (the USED line), and the average effective sample count (AVG N EFF — see the glossary), where 1.0 means every motion gate closed and the result is the same as Temporal being off. If the pass did not run it names which of nine reasons in one line: MODULE OFF, TEMPORAL 0, BELOW FULL RES, DRAFT RENDER, THUMBNAIL, SOFTWARE PATH, NO NEIGHBORS, GPU MEMORY or DUPLICATE FRM. Fewer frames used than the window asks for is not a fault; at a cut or a clip boundary, a narrower window is the correct render.
The fall-off in brightness toward the corners that every real lens has. Because it dims the light before the film records it, the corners change in contrast as well as brightness — and by an amount that depends on which film stock you have chosen. That is the difference between this and a corner-darkening mask drawn on top.
No, and the copy should never imply otherwise. The entries — from a gentle modern fall-off through vintage glass to anamorphic — are named for the look they give rather than measured from real lenses, so trust your eye over the label. Manual leaves the controls below to you; every other entry sets Strength, Outer Radius, Inner Falloff and Vignette Stretch (H/V) for you. Touching one of those sliders takes over: the popup switches to Manual and the other sliders are filled in from the preset you were on, so the picture doesn't jump — you carry on from the preset rather than starting over.
Strength is how dark the corners get: 0 is no vignette, 1 is the full fall-off of the selected shape. Vignette Shape is the shape of the fall-off — Lens-like (cos4) is the steepest and most lens-like of the three, taken from the shape of the cos4 law rather than computed from a real focal length, so read it as a character rather than as a measurement; Soft (Gaussian) and Smooth (Smoothstep) are softer, more stylized curves. Any preset other than Manual sets Strength for you.
Outer Radius is how far out the vignette reaches — smaller values bring the darkening in toward the center. Worth knowing: on a 16:9 or wider frame most presets already reach past the corner, so raising this changes the falloff across the frame while leaving the corner itself at full strength. Inner Falloff is how quickly the vignette starts once it begins: low values give a long gentle gradient, high values a tighter, more visible ring. Vignette Stretch (H/V) stretches the vignette horizontally or vertically (a 0.5–2 slider; 1 is round), for a lens whose vignette is not circular — it is not the same thing as Anamorphic Weave in the Gate Weave group. All three are set for you by any preset other than Manual.
Center X and Center Y move the center of the vignette for a subject that is not in the middle of frame. Vignette Tint tints the darkened corners rather than only dimming them — positive goes warm, negative cool.
A lens effect, and the distinction is the whole point of the module. There is no Diffusion checkbox: choosing a filter in Diffusion Filter turns it on, and Off (the default) switches it off entirely and costs nothing. This is the halo and lifted contrast of a net or a diffusion filter in front of the lens — what you would have got by screwing a filter on on the day. Nothing in the negative itself does this. The film's own light scatter is far smaller than a pixel and lives in the Film Sharpness (MTF) group; lens flare is a different thing again.
The entries are shaped after the classic filter sets: the Black PM grades, White PM, HBM, Black Sat, Golden Glow, Warm PM and Glimmer, plus Manual, which leaves the controls below to you, and Off, where it ships. Black PM 1/8, the first filter on the list, is the lightest measured black grade — a whisper rather than a look. The Black PM, Warm PM and Glimmer ladders are measured — their glow, their color and their shadow lift were fitted to footage of the real filters, grade by grade — so those grade numbers mean what they do on set. The other families were matched by eye, and we say so. Warm PM is the warm-tinted member of the PM group: the same scatter as White PM with a fixed warm cast that does not change as you climb the grades. Glimmer is the lightest touch in the list — a faint, near-neutral glow around the brightest sources and almost no shadow lift, even at grade 4.
Try this: grade numbers are per family. Black PM 1/2 and Warm PM 1/2 are not the same amount of scatter, and the two measured ladders cross. Judge a grade inside its family, never across the list.
It is the diffusion amount, and it only reaches the picture on Manual. It scales the whole filter — halo and veil together — but the Diffusion Filter popup replaces it outright on every other entry, and the shipped default is Off, not Manual. Select Manual and the slider comes alive. The same goes for every Diffusion slider whose label ends in "(Manual)".
How much of the diffusion filter's flat milky veil comes with the halo (not to be confused with Lens Veil in Exposure & Contrast or Halation Fog). Lower it when you want the bloom around highlights but not the lifted blacks. The veil is the honest half of the filter: it spreads light rather than adding it, taking out of the sharp image exactly what it lays back down — so raising it costs contrast instead of exposure.
Set Show to Glow Sources for a diagnostic overlay of which parts of the frame are throwing the glow (it says FILTER OFF while Diffusion Filter is Off). With Glow Threshold at 0 every pixel scatters in proportion to its brightness, so the bands read as contribution relative to a mid-gray pixel; raise the Glow Threshold and they read as stops above it instead — and the key strip prints those levels as exact stops, numbers rather than words. A viewing aid only — and, like every overlay in the panel, it renders into the frame, so switch it off before you export.
Scatter Amt (Manual) is what share of the light the filter scatters — 0.25 means a quarter of each pixel's light is bent out of its straight path and spread into the glow. The light is moved, not added, so overall exposure does not change; only where the light sits does. For scale, the Black PM rows run about 0.01 at 1/8 up to 0.82 at 2. Glow Threshold sets a brightness below which light does not scatter at all — zero, the default, is the physical case where all light scatters in proportion to brightness; raise it to confine the glow to highlights, which is an artistic choice rather than what the glass does. It works under every filter preset as well as Manual: it is added to the preset's own threshold. Glow Spread (Manual) is how far the glow spreads. The two "(Manual)" sliders here only reach the picture with Diffusion Filter on Manual; Glow Threshold is live on every filter.
Glow Edge Warmth is how much the glow's color changes from its center to its edge. Measured against real filter footage, a diffusion glow is not one color: its core is close to neutral and carries most of the light, while its outer edge is markedly warmer. 1 gives the measured amount, which is what every preset uses; toward 0 the edge cools back to neutral while the center keeps its color. Glow Tint Amount is how colored the glow is overall — 0 gives a neutral white glow, 1 the full measured color — and it scales center and edge together. It works under every filter preset, scaling the preset's own color, so pull it down to keep a filter's spread and softness without its amber. Both cost no brightness at any setting: the glow delivers the same light and only moves color around.
Shadow Lift (Manual) lifts the shadows independently of the bloom, for the fogged look of a lighter filter grade — it is a straight lift rather than scattered light, which is why the black grades ship with none of it and the white ones with some. Contrast Loss (Manual) flattens overall contrast the way a heavy net does; it is a tone adjustment above mid gray rather than more scattering, so reach for it only after the veil has not given you enough, and 0 leaves contrast alone. Skin Soften (Manual) softens fine texture without blooming it — the skin-smoothing half of a diffusion filter. All three reach the picture only with Diffusion Filter on Manual.
The on/off switch and the amount for this module live at the top of the panel; these are its character controls.
How much of the weave is vertical relative to horizontal. At 1, where it ships, the two axes carry the same amplitude — which is what a camera maker's single steadiness figure implies, and what the projection standard's own small-screen row tabulates. Lower it for a gate that wanders further side to side than up and down; well above 1 the motion starts to read as a mechanical fault rather than as life.
They are the two entries of Weave Mode. The projector wanders further and faster than the camera and adds relatively more up-and-down motion, because it re-seats every frame where a camera holds it on pins. There is also a routing difference that matters: in Projector Gate the film-borne stages — grain, dirt, halation, diffusion, MTF and adjacency — ride the weave within the frame, the way they do on real projected film, rather than staying welded to the screen. Camera Gate renders exactly as it always did. Note that from the shipped vertical ratio of 1, the projector multiplier puts up-and-down motion above side-to-side, which is further than the projection standard's own tolerance table goes — lower Weave Vertical Ratio if you want it to sit inside that table. It is also what an audience actually saw.
Try this: the projector routing is invisible while the grain redraws every frame. Turn Animate Grain off, or set Coarse Hold (frames) above 1, and you can watch the grain travel with the weaving frame.
Weave Cycle (frames) is how many frames one side-to-side cycle takes: shorter is jittery, longer is a slow drift. Side-to-side motion is held to a floor of four frames however low you set it, because a real gate cannot weave that fast. Weave Jitter is how irregular the weave is: at 0 it is a clean repeating motion, and at 1, where it ships, the up-and-down component is drawn afresh every frame — which is how a real gate re-seats film — while the side-to-side component stays mostly a slow drift at any setting. That split is why raising it reads as gate weave rather than as noise. Anamorphic Weave scales the horizontal and vertical motion differently, to match an anamorphic capture.
A colorist's grade rendered through the film — the creative pass, not a film process, and the group's name says so. Its on/off switch is labeled Color. It sits above Film Stock in the panel because that is where it acts: everything you dial here is then rendered through the emulsion and the print, so the panel reads the way the chain runs — Color Grade, then Film Stock, then Print. Color Preset picks the look: Faded Matte, Warm Print, Cool Bleach, Teal Orange and B and W Tone each set a whole split-tone and saturation grade; Manual applies none of it and leaves the saturation controls below to you. Color Strength is how far the preset goes; it starts at half strength, because a preset at 1.00 is the full graphic version of that look and most work sits below it.
Saturation in one tonal band each. Pulling shadow saturation down is what gives a faded print its gray blacks. Midtone is where skin lives. Pulling highlight saturation down keeps bright colors from going electric. All three are set for you by any preset other than Manual.
No, and this is worth being precise about: it darkens colors in proportion to how saturated they already are — a chroma-keyed neutral density, which grading practice calls subtractive saturation. It is the all-colors version of the six Color Density dials below it. Neutrals are untouched, and the colors keep their hue and their relative strength: nothing is added, and nothing shifts. It is a density behavior, not a simulation of individual dye layers — we would rather name the category honestly than overclaim the physics.
Six dials (Red Density, Yellow Density, Green Density, Cyan Density, Blue Density and Magenta Density) each deepen one color family. That color gets darker and richer the more saturated it already is, and neutrals never move. Each dial runs 0–1, starts at 0, and works on its own — every position does something, from a fresh instance.
They add to Color Density (all), the all-colors version: each color gets the master plus its own dial. Set all six to one value and you get the same result as the master alone, apart from a tiny fade near neutral (under half an 8-bit code value). There are no seams between colors, and the effect fades out smoothly toward neutral, so it never draws an edge in dark, faintly tinted areas. Skin sits inside red–yellow, so it needs no separate dial.
The highlight shapers below still govern how color behaves at the top of the scale.
Diagnose the stage, correct at the stage:
Film Look routes you: hot on the scope with Film Look off is a source problem; clean with it off but hot with it on is the film or the grade.
They govern how color behaves at the top of the scale, because real dye layers desaturate as they approach maximum density. Highlight Desat is the highlight desaturation amount, as a percentage: how much saturation is taken out of the brightest highlights — raise it and highlight color thins toward the top of the scale; at 0 highlight color is left alone. It is the one highlight-desaturation control in the group. Highlight Desat Start moves the point where that desaturation begins — negative starts it earlier, positive holds full color further up. The ramp still ends at the same point just under white, so this also sets how wide the transition is: negative makes it wider and more gradual, positive narrows it into a more abrupt one.
How much color the Color Grade group drains out of the shadows. (It is not a second Shadow Sat: that one scales shadow saturation up or down; this one only removes.) It acts whenever the group is switched on. Lower it toward 0 to keep shadow color, raise it for a more washed, printed-down look.
Neither pole is "correct" — the choice is taste plus interoperability, and we will not pretend otherwise. CDL Standard is the default and matches the operator the ASC CDL and ACES specifications define, so a grade you build here reads the same way in other tools that follow them; it works on log code, and because of that a saturation boost also brightens strongly colored areas. Keep Brightness instead holds each pixel's actual brightness while the color moves, so reds and blues stop gaining exposure as you saturate them. Neutral grays are untouched either way. This affects the Color Grade group and its saturation controls only — Balance and Film Stock always use the first.
The stock's on/off is Film Look, at the top of the panel, which turns the stock and the print on together; with it off, the Stock selection still names a stock but none of its character is applied. The other direction is worth knowing too, and it explains a common surprise: a stock's tonal character — its contrast, its toe and its shoulder — is carried by the negative, and only reaches the picture through the print. With Print Strength at 0 you get the stock's color and none of its curve, so two stocks that differ only in tone will look identical.
They trim the stock's own curve without leaving the stock. (For negative contrast, use Push/Pull (stops), below.) Shadow Density Trim sets how dense the stock's shadows sit — positive deepens the blacks the way an underexposed negative does, negative opens them up; it is a shift of the negative's speed point in stops, the same number of stops in every working space. Highlight Rolloff Trim positive rolls the highlights off earlier and more gently, negative holds them straighter for longer.
Trims the stock's saturation. It has no effect on Noir 5222 or Noir 5231, the two black-and-white stocks: each is converted to monochrome inside its own character, so there is no color left for the trim to act on.
Each trims one layer's toe — the bottom of the film curve, where shadow detail starts to disappear. Positive lifts that color out of the blacks, negative buries it. They are not interchangeable: green carries most of the luminance, so the green toe moves shadow detail as well as shadow color, and blue is the noisiest record on most stocks, which makes the blue toe the shadow-color control with the most visible reach.
Each trims one layer's shoulder — the top of the film curve, where highlights compress. Positive rolls that layer off earlier. Because red and blue sit opposite each other, the practical effect is a color move at the top end: rolling red off earlier cools bright areas, rolling blue off earlier warms them. Green again dominates luminance, so its shoulder changes how the whole highlight rolls, not only its color.
Set Show to Stock Curves and it draws a readout over the picture of the stock you have selected — named in the strip, so you always know which emulsion the curves belong to: its characteristic curves for red, green and blue, and the contrast, shoulder and toe values actually being used — your trims included, not the untouched table values. Every printed number carries a one-letter provenance tag: C where it was fitted to a published chart, V where it was set by eye, S where it is invented. The year appears only where we hold a dated source for it and reads YEAR NO SRC otherwise, because a year attached to a coined name is a claim about which real emulsion it is. And because the curves are the negative's, and the negative is only developed inside the Print stage, the panel says PRINT OFF when Print Strength is at 0 — the curve you are looking at is not reaching the picture — and NEG CURVES when the print is live. With Film Look off it says FILM LOOK OFF, because no stock is reaching the picture. Diagnostic only; it changes nothing about the render underneath it.
It simulates developing the negative longer or shorter than normal. Push/Pull (stops) is how many stops: positive pushes, raising contrast; negative pulls, flattening the image. 0 is normal development and turns it off — there is no separate switch. It is the one negative-contrast dial in the Film Stock group. It does not change grain.
The Grain switch and Grain Amount live at the top of the panel; these are its character controls.
Which grain character is used. Each entry carries its own amount, size and tonal weighting, tuned by eye to look right at 4K and drawing on published granularity data for the negative stocks, so the differences between entries are a real part of each stock's character, not one fineness dial with different labels on it. Match Stock derives the choice from your main Stock selection, so the grain belongs to the film you picked; choose an entry explicitly to override that.
Both work under every Grain Stock entry, Match Stock included. Grain Size is a multiple of the stock's own grain size: 1.00 is the size set for that stock, by eye on a 4K display: faster stocks run larger, from 1.00 on 50D to 1.25 on 500T, and 2.00 makes every grain twice as large (range 0.5–8). Bigger grain also reads grainier at the same Amount, so lower Grain Amount to taste. Below 1.00 at HD the change is subtle, because the grain is already close to one delivered pixel. Grain Softness softens the grain the way a lens or a scan would, on top of the stock's own softness. 0 is the stock's own softness with nothing added: crisp on every stock except the Teatro 2383 print, which carries a little of its own. On Manual, the two sliders are the size and softness themselves. Sizes follow the frame's long edge, so a vertical 9:16 project gets the same grain as the same shot in landscape. Film Gauge scales the grain too, but by less than the other film-borne modules (see What does Film Gauge change?); Grain Size scales the grain alone.
It makes fine grain read as sharper, more separate specks by removing its broad, blotchy part. The range is 0 to 100, and it ships at 100. It works under every Grain Stock entry and leaves coarse grain alone. It's set to hold about the same strength at UHD, and viewed smaller, the grain gets somewhat quieter.
Any setting above 0 costs the same playback time: on an RTX 4090-class GPU, about 22 to 29 ms per UHD frame with color grain and 16 ms with Monochromatic Grain. At 0 it's off and costs nothing, so if playback is struggling, set it to 0.
Because of delivery. Neutral grain survives compressed delivery far better: colored grain puts fine detail into the chroma channels, which streaming codecs subsample and quantize hardest, so it can break up into a moire-like pattern on web platforms. Turn it off for per-record color grain on a master you are not compressing. Under Match Stock on Noir 5222 or Noir 5231 it is forced on, because a silver stock has one record and cannot produce chromatic grain.
Animate Grain decides whether the pattern changes frame to frame — turn it off to freeze a still, or to grade a frozen frame without the grain crawling. Grain Seed shifts the random seed; change it when two instances of the effect are producing visibly identical grain. Coarse Hold (frames) holds the coarse grain layer for a number of frames before it changes, which slows the largest structure down and is closer to how projected grain reads.
Where the grain sits in the chain. Printed (post-print) puts it after the print stage, where a release print's grain sits. Negative (pre-print) puts it before, so the print stage develops the grain along with the image. The negative position images the grain through the print when Film Sharpness (MTF) and Print Softness are on, at every delivery size and every gauge. With Print Softness off, the two positions differ in tone rather than in imaging.
Grain Stretch stretches the grain horizontally or vertically (it is the grain's own shape, not your frame's aspect ratio); set it away from 1 to match an anamorphic capture, whose grain is squeezed with the image. Grain Streak pulls the grain into directional streaks rather than round clumps; 0 is the isotropic default. Warmth (Manual) tints the grain warm or cool. Plus warms it (more red, less blue in each grain) and minus cools it; green is untouched. The tint fades out in the deepest shadows and brightest highlights, where film grain carries no color of its own, and it works with Monochromatic Grain on as well. It reaches the picture only with Grain Stock on Manual, like the other "(Manual)" sliders in this group.
Midtones (Manual) is the midtone grain: how much grain lands in the midtones relative to shadows and highlights: raising it fills the mid-scale in, so it changes where the grain sits on the tone scale rather than how much there is overall (the fader at the top of the panel is the control for overall amount). It also sets the level at the very bottom of the scale. Fine Grain (Manual) is the amplitude of the fine layer, which carries the high-frequency sparkle; Coarse Grain (Manual) is the slower, clumpier structure that reads at a distance. All three are set for you on every Grain Stock entry except Manual — and Match Stock is an entry.
They set the amplitude of each dye record's grain: the cyan record lands on red, magenta on green, yellow on blue. The shipped defaults are the fitted per-layer ratios, and green is the reference layer the other two are normalized against. Yellow is the loudest layer on most stocks, which is why blue grain reads first. Changing one alone shifts the grain's color.
The Halation switch and Halation Amount live at the top of the panel; these are its character controls.
Which stock's halation behavior is used. Match Stock derives it from your main Stock selection; pick an entry explicitly to override that.
Threshold (Manual) is the halation threshold, in stops over mid-gray: how bright a highlight has to be before it starts to halate — the same scale the key strip of Halation Sources (on the Show menu) prints. Lower it and mid-tones begin to glow, raise it and only the brightest speculars do; the range runs −3 to +4 stops and the default is +1.85. As the label says, Halation Stock sets it on every entry except Manual, and Match Stock is an entry. Threshold Trim (stops) moves the threshold on top of whatever sets it, the stock's own or Threshold (Manual), so it works on every entry: 0 leaves it where it is, +1 asks for a highlight one stop brighter before it glows, minus lets more of the picture glow. Halation Sources reads its bands over the same moved threshold. Real film has no threshold at all — this is a look control, and the honest default is the stock's. Halation Softness is how far the halation spreads — larger values give a broader, softer red bloom around the same highlights — and it is live regardless.
Halo Color Fringe is a look control: it lets the halo's color separate toward its edge by giving the green and blue parts of the halo different reach. It is not a model of how the records scatter in the base — real halation's red comes from the layer order, not from different scatter distances — so treat it as styling, not physics. Halo Hue Shift rotates the halo's hue away from red — real halation is red because the red record sits deepest, so move this only deliberately. Halo Desat (Manual) is halo desaturation, and does what its name says: 0 is the reddest halo the engine can make, and raising it moves the halo toward neutral — a fully neutral halo is not reachable from this control. The shipped 0.8 is the model's own calibrated color set, so leaving it alone is the physical choice; move it only to stylize. All three do nothing at all under Match Stock on Noir 5222 or Noir 5231: a silver emulsion has no dye layers for them to steer.
Halation Aura is a second, wider glow around the main halo: the look of a stock with its anti-halation backing removed, where light returns from much further away. 0 is off. Aura Size (needs Aura) widens it and only does anything when Aura is above 0. Aura Green Tint is how much green that wide aura carries — real no-backing halos are not purely red, and this is that residue. Halation Fog is a soft red lift that follows the light: it averages the brightness over the halo's own radius around each pixel and adds a little red-weighted fog there, so it lifts the blacks near bright areas rather than glowing around highlights — and it is local, not a uniform wash across the whole frame. Aura Green Tint and Halation Fog both go silent under Match Stock on the two Noir stocks. The Aura is a smooth, exact blur at every setting.
Set Show to Halation Sources for a diagnostic overlay of which highlights are driving halation (it says MODULE OFF with Halation switched off), its key strip printed in exact stops rather than words. A viewing aid only, and it renders into the frame — switch it off before you export. Judge halation at 100 percent view: a fit-to-window preview downsamples the frame first, which averages away the near-clipped pixels the effect keys on, so the halo you see small is not the halo you get delivered.
Expert controls. Most people only need Halo Shape.
It sets which way the halo is colored on print stock, and it only does something when Film Stock is Teatro 2383 and Halation Stock is Match — every other combination ignores it. Print film is coated in the opposite order to camera film: the manufacturer's own layer diagram puts the blue-sensitive layer nearest the base, then red, then green, so light bouncing off the base hits blue first and a print halo is blue-violet, not red. Physical follows that layer order. Stylized Red gives a red halo, the look people know from camera negative — a style choice, not a second opinion about the physics.
It selects which stock's measured sharpness curves the Film Sharpness (MTF) group uses; Match Stock derives it from your main Stock selection. The blur is a fraction of the frame and keeps working below a pixel, so a preview at any size shows the softening the export shows at that size. Differences between stocks are subtle at HD, as they should be. The Noir 5222 entry is a channel-uniform row, because a silver image has one record and not three; Match Stock picks it for both black-and-white stocks, Noir 5222 and Noir 5231 (their published resolving power is identical).
Emulsion Softness is how soft the emulsion is overall — larger values scatter light further inside the layer, which is what a faster stock does. Edge Sharpening is the adjacency-style edge enhancement development produces (photo science calls it acutance); it puts back some of the apparent sharpness the scattering takes away. Sharpen Radius is the edge sharpening radius — how wide that edge sits: small radii sharpen fine texture, larger ones put a visible halo on edges.
Color Softening is how much light scatters sideways between the color layers; it softens color more than luminance, which is what stacked emulsions do. Softness Tail Shape blends in a heavy-tailed point spread instead of a plain gaussian, keeping a faint softening far from an edge as measured film point spreads do — and it does not change overall softness: the kernel is re-solved so the delivered blur width stays the same at every setting, and only the far tail moves. If you want more blur, use Emulsion Softness. Highlight Scatter makes the softening depend on exposure so highlights scatter more than shadows; a stylistic control, not a measured one. 0 is off on both.
It adds the softening that comes from printing the negative onto print film (a contact print). It is selected by default, but it only runs when the Film Sharpness (MTF) switch at the top of the panel is on, and then you get the negative's and the print's softness together. It also needs the print live: Film Look on and Print Strength above 0.
Its blur is drawn from published sharpness data for the 2383 release print. It is a fraction of the frame, so it works at every size, HD included. At 35mm it is a sub-pixel softening, which is why it is subtle; the smaller gauges enlarge it. The print's blue channel is about twice as soft as green, as on a real release print, and all three channels switch on together. High Quality doesn't affect this stage.
The local contrast real development produces at edges, where exhausted developer next to a dense area leaves a visible fringe. Adjacency Stock picks which stock's behavior is used; Match Stock derives it from your main Stock selection.
Adjacency (Manual) is how strong the edge effect is on Manual — higher values give film's characteristic bite at high-contrast boundaries. Adjacency Stock sets it on every other entry, and Match Stock is an entry. Adjacency Amount scales the edge effect against what your Adjacency Stock calls for (or Adjacency (Manual) on Manual), so it works on every entry: 100% is exactly that amount, 200% doubles it, 0 removes it. The effect is subtle by nature; judge it on high-contrast edges at full resolution. Adjacency Radius is how far the effect reaches from a boundary: small radii read as sharpening, larger ones as a visible fringe. Edge Threshold (expert) is how much of an edge is needed before the effect engages; raising it keeps it off flat areas and grain-level detail. Cross-Color Edges (expert) is where one color layer's development suppresses its neighbors (lab term: interimage) — what gives color negative its cross-channel edge color. 0 is off.
Set Show to Adjacency Map for a diagnostic overlay of where the adjacency stage is finding edges, with a legend that declares its scale. With the module off it says MODULE OFF, and with the effect at zero (Adjacency Amount 0, or Adjacency (Manual) 0 on Manual) it says AMOUNT 0. A viewing aid only, drawn into the frame — switch it off before you export.
The colored blobs a developed dye layer actually forms — which is what color negative grain physically is. Dye Cloud Stock picks which stock's cloud sizes are used. Match Stock derives it from your main Stock selection, and on Noir 5222 or Noir 5231 it derives off entirely: a silver stock forms no dyes, so there is nothing for the module to model. Choose an entry explicitly if you want the effect on a mono stock anyway.
Dye Cloud Amount is how visible the clouds are — it scales their amplitude, not their size. The three cloud size sliders — Cyan Size (Manual), Magenta Size (Manual) and Yellow Size (Manual) — are the cyan, magenta and yellow layers' cloud diameters on the negative, in microns: larger clouds read as coarser color structure in that channel. In every shipped row the cyan clouds are the largest and the yellow the smallest, in the ratio 1 : 0.70 : 0.50 (the Manual defaults are 5.0, 3.5 and 2.5 microns). All three are Manual-only, and Match Stock is an entry, so on the shipped default they are not reaching the picture. Cloud Color Variation (expert) is how independently the three layers clump: at 0 they move together and the structure reads as neutral; toward 1 each layer clumps on its own and the noise takes on color.
Set Show to Dye Clouds for a diagnostic overlay of the dye cloud field itself, with a legend that declares its scale. With the module off it says MODULE OFF; on a black-and-white stock under Match Stock, where a silver image forms no dye clouds, SILVER STOCK; and at Dye Cloud Amount 0, AMOUNT 0. A viewing aid only, drawn into the frame.
The dust, hairs and sparkle that collect on a negative and on a print in circulation. Dirt Preset picks how dirty and in what way — the entries run from a clean negative through fresh and worn prints to archive material and small-gauge documentary. Any preset other than Manual sets the density, size, dark/light split, opacity and tint controls for you. Touching one of those sliders takes over: the popup switches to Manual and the other sliders are filled in from the preset you were on, so the dirt doesn't jump.
Dirt Amount is how many particles land on the frame, bright and dark together — the single control that separates a clean print from a battered one. Dark Speck Share sets how much of that dirt is dark rather than bright. Where each kind of speck comes from: bright specks are dirt that was on the negative — it blocks the printing light, and a negative-working print stock leaves that spot clear — and dark specks are dirt and debris on the print itself or in the projector gate.
It is how large the particles are: small sizes read as dust, larger ones as debris in the gate. And yes — the size is a physical one, so it follows Film Gauge. The same speck is about twice as wide on a Super 16 frame and four times as wide on Super 8 as it is on 35mm, which is four and eighteen times the frame area. Any Dirt Preset other than Manual sets it for you.
Animate Dirt decides whether the dirt changes frame to frame; turn it off to freeze it on a still. Dirt Strength blends the whole dirt layer against the clean image, so you keep the pattern and simply have less of it. Particle Opacity (expert) is how opaque the particles are, bright and dark alike: at 1 a speck blocks all the light it covers, lower thins both populations together, and at 0 the dirt disappears entirely. Dirt Tint (expert) tints the dirt — real emulsion debris is rarely neutral; positive goes warm, negative cool. Opacity and Tint are both set for you by any preset other than Manual.
Dirt Seed offsets the dirt's random seed; change it when two instances of the effect are drawing the same dirt on the same frames. Reseed Dirt does that for you in one click — choose New Seed from This Frame: it sets the seed from this frame's own content, so different clips stop sharing the same specks without you inventing numbers. It is deterministic, not random — the same clip clicked again lands on the same seed — and the value is written into the dial above, where you can see it, undo it and keep it in a preset. It moves only when you click, and if the frame gives no answer the dial is left untouched.
Try this: one click per clip at the top of a reel, and no two shots share dirt for the whole show — through every re-render and every export.
The dye loss and base yellowing a release print picks up over decades in storage. Fade Stock Era is the print stock era being aged — older chromogenic prints fade faster and pinker, and the Dye Transfer IB entry is effectively fade-free, because imbibition dyes were never chromogenic. Fade Storage is how it was kept: cool dry archival storage barely ages, hot and humid storage accelerates every decay term. Fade Age (years) is how many years to apply. The cyan dye goes first, which is why old prints go pink.
Cyan Fade Rate, Magenta Fade Rate and Yellow Fade Rate each multiply one dye's decay rate (1 is the era's own rate). Cyan is the least stable dye in a chromogenic print and drives most of the pink shift. Magenta is the most stable of the three, so raising its multiplier is a deliberate departure from real chemistry — worth knowing before you do it. Yellow sits between them. Base Yellowing is the yellow stain the film picks up with age, from leftover color couplers and oxidized developer in the emulsion, so it warms the whole frame including the blacks.
Fade Strength blends the whole aging result against the fresh print — a straight wet-dry mix, so half strength is half the fade on every control in this group. Fade Model picks how the aging is computed. Physical (dye loss) is the default and follows the Beer–Lambert law of dye absorption: it removes a fraction of each dye, so density falls, contrast goes with it, shadows go maroon and saturated blue skies wash out toward white, while anything already at paper white stays exactly where it is. Classic is a stylized fade built from a shadow lift and a highlight tint tuned by eye rather than derived — a style choice, not a second opinion about the chemistry.
The frame-to-frame brightness wander of a projector lamp, a hand-cranked camera or a mains-driven light. Flicker Mode picks the source: Projector Drift and Camera Modern are slow and gentle; Hand-Crank Silent Era is the irregular exposure of a cranked camera; Mains AC Beat is the steady pulse of an AC-driven lamp.
Flicker Amount (stops) is how far the brightness swings — a tenth of a stop is already visible in a dark scene. It is the one amount control. Flicker Speed (Hz) is how fast it cycles in real time, so it holds its rate whatever the project frame rate is; on Mains AC Beat remember a lamp pulses at twice the mains frequency, so 24 fps on 60 Hz mains divides exactly and a real projector shows no beat at all, while 50 Hz mains at 24 fps gives about 4 Hz. Flicker Color Wander is how differently the three color channels flicker: at 0 it is neutral brightness, and raising it lets the color wander the way a real lamp does — as it dips it cools, with blue falling fastest and red least. Dropout Chance is the chance per frame of a much larger drop, the way a worn projector occasionally stumbles; 0 never drops.
Animate Flicker decides whether the flicker advances with the timeline — turn it off to freeze it on a still. Flicker Seed shifts the seed; change it when two instances of the effect are flickering in step.
It is presence added in the mid tones without sharpening edges — and it is explicitly not a film process. Nothing in a real film chain does this; the film's own edge effect is the Edge Effects (Adjacency) stage, which works at a different scale, with the opposite polarity at an edge. This is a grading control. It is gated by tone: it acts only in the mid range and is fully inert in the deep shadows and the brights. One measured consequence to expect, because it sits downstream of Grain: it amplifies grain as well as detail — about 25 to 31 percent on a flat midtone area such as a sky, a wall or a cheek, and between a third of a percent and 10 percent on detailed footage where the edge rejection dilutes it. That figure does not change with delivery resolution.
Amount is how much local contrast is added in the mid tones; negative values soften instead, which is a gentler route to a diffused look than the Diffusion stage. Radius is the size of the detail worked on, anchored to the frame's long edge rather than absolute pixels — so a given setting covers the same fraction of the picture at any resolution. Sizes scale with the frame's long edge, so a vertical 9:16 project gets the same grain and halo size as the same shot in landscape. The default of 16 works hardest on detail about 15 pixels across on an HD frame and about 30 across on a 4K one. Small values bring out texture; large values shape broader forms.
Edge Tolerance is how large a tonal difference counts as an edge rather than as texture. Higher values allow halos. It is what keeps the effect off edges and prevents halos, and it is the only thing that does — push it toward its maximum and that protection goes away by design: the filter stops distinguishing edges from texture and starts behaving like a sharpener, halos included. Measured on a step edge, the overshoot goes from nothing at the default of 5 to 13 percent of the edge at 20. Note it works the opposite way round from an unsharp mask's threshold: that protects flat areas, this protects edges. Shadow Reach and Highlight Reach set how far down and up the effect reaches: at their defaults it fades out below the lower mid tones and above the upper mid tones, so noise in the blacks is never amplified and bright detail is never made crunchy.
The group's label reads Presets, LUTs & Export. It holds presets, still export, LUT import and LUT export, and it sits at the very end of the panel.
Save Preset writes the current grade to a .decolorispreset file — set it to Save and a file dialog opens; the control returns to Off by itself. The dialog opens in your Documents\Decoloris Presets folder — the same Documents folder Windows and the installer use, so it is correct on a machine whose Documents lives in OneDrive. The two factory presets, Neutral (Verified) (every module off — the verified pass-through starting point) and Grain and Halation Only, travel inside the plug-in and are written into that folder the first time you open the dialog if they are not already there; a preset you have edited is never overwritten. Load Preset loads one over the current grade. Only the parameters stored in the file are touched, so a partial preset leaves the rest of your grade alone. Presets travel between hosts.
A preset carries the look, not your setup. Camera Input, Output, Scope, Scope Position, Show, Show Tone Curves and the skin picker (Use Skin Picker, Handle, Sample Point) are left as they are when you load one, so a look saved on one camera can't silently re-decode another. Your host's copy and paste carries everything, including those. With Handle on Balance Wheel, Save Preset stores the balance the wheel is showing.
It writes the frame you are looking at to a still image file, exactly as it renders here including the Output transform. Set it to Export and a file dialog opens; the control returns to Off by itself and the file appears once the frame next redraws. Export Format picks the file: PNG 16-bit keeps the full depth of the render and is the one to send to a colorist or a print, PNG 8-bit is for the web, TIFF 16-bit is uncompressed and opens anywhere. None of these settings changes your picture.
It is the creative LUT switch: it applies a .cube LUT of your own on top of the finished picture. It runs after everything else, including the Output transform — which is what the "(after Output)" in the label is telling you: the LUT must be one made for the space Output is set to. A Rec.709 LUT over a Log output will look wrong, and the plugin cannot tell. With no file loaded it does nothing at all.
Load LUT... opens a file dialog. Once a LUT is loaded the control reads Active; with none loaded it reads Off. Choose Clear loaded LUT to remove it from this clip. Selecting Active by hand does nothing — it is where the control rests, not a command. A copy of the file is kept in your Documents under Decoloris LUTs / Imported, so the LUT comes back when you reopen the project and travels with a saved preset. 3D cubes only, tetrahedral interpolation; 1D .cube files are declined.
How much of the loaded LUT is applied, from none at 0 to the full LUT at 100. It blends against the picture as it looked before the LUT, so 50 is exactly half way.
Export LUT writes the color half of your grade to a .cube file in Documents, at 33 or 65 points per side. Choose 65, and set your host's LUT interpolation to tetrahedral where it offers the choice: that is the closest match to the plug-in, with 99.3–100% of pixels within one 8-bit code in our tests. 33 is lighter to load but drifts further, mostly on saturated highlights, and trilinear interpolation is worse than tetrahedral at either size. A LUT is a per-pixel color mapping, so it carries the color pipeline — and it cannot carry grain, halation, diffusion, dirt or any other spatial stage. The popup entries (33 cube - color, no grain and 65 cube - color, no grain) say "no grain" for that reason. Export is not available when Output is ACEScct, which is scene-referred; switch to a display output such as one of the Rec.709 entries to export. With Handle on Balance Wheel, the LUT carries the balance the wheel is showing.
Try this: turn on Show Tone Curves in the Setup group. It evaluates the same chain the exporter bakes, so what you see there is what the LUT will carry.
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