DECOLORIS

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What every tool does, in the order the panel presents them.

Decoloris runs your footage down the whole path of film — decoded from your camera, balanced, exposed onto a negative, printed onto release stock, roughed up by everything a real print picks up on its way to a screen, and delivered to your standard. The panel is laid out in that same order, top to bottom: the further down you scroll, the later in film's life you are.

The fastest route to a good image: make neutrals neutral, put skin about a stop above mid-grey, then let the Skin Analysis readout quote you the printing correction. That three-step workflow has its own guide in the FAQ, and its own video.

Here's the panel, top to bottom.

The top strip

Master Strength fades the whole look on one fader — at zero you get your untouched picture, correctly decoded and delivered, with nothing you dialed lost. Camera Input tells Decoloris what your footage is — your camera's log format, the most important setting on the first frame. Output is what leaves: Rec.709 for delivery, P3, HDR, sRGB, or log to keep grading downstream. Full guide →

Setup

The "is my footage wired right" corner: the space the chain runs in, how much highlight your camera really carries — set automatically from its published ceiling — and overlays that mark, right on the picture, any pixel that says you picked the wrong format. Set once per project, then forget it. Full guide →

The film choices

Pick your negative — camera stocks, two black-and-white silver stocks, a reversal, a print emulsion — and use the two strength faders to dial how much of the stock's character and how developed the print is. Most of film's signature lives in the print. Full guide →

Exposure & the light

Exposure in real stops, and a declaration of what the scene was actually lit at — not what you want it to look like. Taste comes later, so you always keep a true zero; Auto Balance writes a checkable estimate when you don't know. Full guide →

Diagnostics & scopes

Instruments, not autopilots: exposure maps in stops, Skin Analysis diagnostics that quote corrections the way a lab timer does, and a scope that reads the chain at points no host scope can reach. They measure — you dial. Every overlay renders into the frame on purpose, and the amber DIAG badge tells you one is live: check for it before you export. Full guide →

Presets & Export

Save and load grades as files that travel between hosts; export the frame you're looking at as a still, exactly as rendered. Full guide →

LUT Import & Export

Bring your own LUT in — it runs last of all, so it must match your output space. Take your grade out as a LUT — it carries the color exactly, and honestly cannot carry grain or any other texture. Full guide →

Exposure & Balance

The fine balance kit: trims in exact stops, warm/cool shifts in the same units lighting gels are sold in, and channel gains for the casts a color temperature can't describe. If the scene isn't straight, nothing downstream can save it — which is why this group runs first. Full guide →

Chroma Denoise

A light clean of your digital plate before the film adds its own texture — color noise first, because that's the half that's safe to remove. It measures your actual footage, every frame. It is not a rescue tool for ruined footage, and doesn't pretend to be. Full guide →

Vignette

Lens falloff applied before the film records the scene, so the corners change in contrast, not just brightness. The presets are named for their look, not measured from real lenses — and we say so. Full guide →

Diffusion

A filter screwed onto the lens on the day: bloom around the highlights, gently lifted blacks. Some filter ladders were measured from footage of the real glass, grade by grade; the rest were matched by eye — and the list tells you which is which. Full guide →

Gate Weave

The tiny frame-to-frame wander of film through a gate. Real weave is a fraction of a percent of frame width — the scale at which film feels alive without you spotting why. Full guide →

Color

A colorist's grade rendered through the film — and the panel is honest that it's a grade, not a film process. It sits just above the film stock because that's where it acts; presets ship at half strength, because the full version of any look is a lot. Full guide →

Film Stock — the trims

Bend the stock's own curve without leaving the stock: contrast, shadow density, how the highlights roll off. Full guide →

Push / Pull

Develop the negative longer or shorter — contrast and grain move together, the way they do in the tank. Bleach bypass leaves the silver in: dense blacks, drained color. Full guide →

Grain

A physical emulsion model, not a noise overlay: its size and structure follow your film gauge and your stock. It ships neutral-colored because streaming codecs chew up color grain — an honest default you can override for an uncompressed master. Full guide →

Halation

Film's red glow around bright lights — light bouncing off the back of the film base and re-exposing the image from behind. Calibrated per stock; the silver stocks glow neutral, because silver has no dye to color the glow. Full guide →

MTF

The emulsion's own softness, per color layer. It only becomes visible at high delivery resolutions — and we'd rather tell you that than sell you a control you can't see. Full guide →

Adjacency

Development chemistry at edges — the subtle bite film gets where dense meets thin. Full guide →

Dye Cloud

What color-negative grain physically is: the developed dye clouds themselves, layer by layer. Full guide →

Dirt

Dust and debris — and where it sat decides how it looks: dirt on the negative prints bright, dirt on the print shows dark. One click reseeds it per clip, so no two shots share specks. Full guide →

Print — the lab

Printer lights in real printer points — the unit a lab timer actually works in — negative exposure, and timing that holds mid-grey the way a lab times every release print. The Skin Analysis readout quotes its corrections in these same points; one to three points is a real correction. Full guide →

Fade (Archival)

Decades in a storage can, as controls: era, storage conditions, years. The cyan dye dies first — that's why old prints go pink. Full guide →

Flicker

The brightness wander of a projector lamp, a hand-cranked camera, or a mains-driven light — in real stops, at real frequencies. Full guide →

Local Contrast

Presence in the midtones, kept away from shadows, highlights and edges. Also not a film process — and it says so. Full guide →

Utility

Leave High Quality on — turning it off is a faster preview, not a milder look. The rest of Utility is study tools and bookkeeping the FAQ explains. Full guide →

Want depth on any of this? Every card above has a full entry in the Decoloris FAQ — every control, its real units, its honest limits. Want to watch instead? The training videos cover one group at a time, starting with the five-minute mental model and the three-step balancing workflow.

Trying Decoloris? Everything on this page works exactly the same in the trial. When it earns a place in your work, decoloris.com is where it becomes yours.