Yes, if you leave them on. Every overlay in this panel — Show Diagnostics, Show Scopes, and every module's Show ... checkbox — 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. The Decoloris scopes read the tone-and-color chain at the tap you choose, so grain, dirt, halation, diffusion, MTF, adjacency, dye cloud, local contrast, denoise, vignette, gate weave and flicker are not in the reading — that is what "(no grain)" on every Scope entry means. 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. Adobe hosts never showed per-control hover help. DaVinci Resolve used to, and as of v2.158.0 it no longer does: the tooltips popped up over the work and distracted more than they taught. 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.
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: exposure in stops, and white balance by declaring the light the scene was shot under. 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, print exposure, print timing.
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 reads in that order. The controls you touch most sit near the top — the first three rows, the Setup group, then the everyday controls — and the deep controls sit in twirled-down groups underneath, in chain order.
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. Then declare the light: Source (As Shot) Kelvin and Source (As Shot) Tint are what the scene was actually lit at, not what you want it to look like. If you don't know, park on a representative frame and fire Auto Balance (est.) once — it writes an estimate into both dials and zeroes the Shift dials so you still have a clean zero to trim from. Check it; it is a starting point, not an answer.
Step 2 — exposure. Set Show Diagnostics to 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, Exposure Trim and Print Exposure (stops) are dialed in. Move Exposure until skin sits where you want it. The classic exposure zone is roughly a stop above mid-gray; the heat map's ladder draws that band for you. The overlay measures, it never dials anything for you.
Step 3 — check what the film did to skin. Switch Show Diagnostics to Output Skin Analysis. It runs the whole chain and reads skin at the end, as printer-light values: red and blue move, green holds, the way a lab timer quotes a correction. Park the Sample Point on the face first so the reading is that face, not the frame average.
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, PRINT OFF, NO FIT, or NOT UNIFORM.
Try this: balance with Film Stock and Print switched off and Scope Reads From set to Output (delivered) — that turns the built-in scope into a plain balance scope for your source. Then switch the film back on and go to step 3.
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, Show Out-of-Range, Show Camera Clip, Auto Camera Range, Ceiling % (Auto) and Film Gauge, which you set once per project. Below Setup come the everyday controls: the stock and its two strength faders, Exposure and the as-shot white balance, the diagnostics and scopes, and the on/off switches for Grain, Halation, Film Sharpness (MTF) and Gate Weave. Then the Presets & Export group (Save Preset, Load Preset, Export Format, Export Still), and after it the deep groups in chain order. 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 % (Auto) 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.
What it marks: out-of-range colors — every pixel that was too saturated for your Output and got pulled back in. Marked pixels get a diagonal white-and-black hatch, with half of each mark left clear so you can still see the color. Saturation was reduced; hue and brightness did not move. The vectorscope's GAMUT line tells you how much of a frame sat outside your Output's range; this tells you where.
How to read it: 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 — ease off the saturation controls (Source Saturation, the Color Grade group, Saturation Trim), or deliver to a wider Output.
On Log and ACEScct outputs nothing is limited, so the box reads LOG OUTPUT under a DIAG LIMIT badge. It renders into your export if you leave it on.
What it's for: a one-glance check that Camera Input matches your footage.
What it marks: camera over-range — any pixel that decodes brighter than your Working Space can hold, so the working space would clip it. There is no threshold; the rule is exact. The hatch runs the opposite way to Show Out-of-Range, so both can be on at once.
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. On Camera Input None nothing is decoded, so it reads NO DECODE under DIAG CAM 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). It renders into your export if you leave it on.
They tell the tone map how much highlight your format actually carries. Auto Camera Range ships on and sets the number for you 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 entries work differently, and it is worth knowing which. Two have no maker figure: DJI D-Log-M is derived from DJI's own conversion LUT, and Nikon N-Log is read off the curve itself. Two involve a standards judgment: HLG is anchored to its BT.2408 diffuse-white scene scale and PQ at 203 nits, matching the HDR output side in both cases. While Auto Camera Range is on, Ceiling % (Auto) — the highlight ceiling — is set for you and your changes there are ignored — the "(Auto)" in the label says so. Turn Auto Camera Range off to set the number yourself; on Camera Input None the slider is always yours. The number is how bright your source can go, as a percentage of reference white. Ceiling % (Auto) does nothing at all when Output is Log, ACEScct or Rec.709 (Gamma 2.4, Clip).
Try this: set Ceiling % (Auto) to your camera's ceiling for clip-free highlights — Sony S-Log3 is about 3900, and most log formats land between 2000 and 5000. 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 and dirt all get coarser relative to the frame as you move from 35mm to Super 16 to Super 8. 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.
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 blends the printed result against the negative. Lower it for a flatter, more negative-like image; 1 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.
Overall exposure in stops, applied before everything else. 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.
They are a declaration, not a taste control. You are telling Decoloris the color temperature and the green-magenta balance the scene was actually lit at — as shot, not as you want it. Decoloris adapts from there to its 6500 K reference, so leaving these at the true source is what neutral looks like. Kelvin runs from 1667 to 20000. On Tint, positive goes magenta and negative goes green.
Try this: to warm or cool the picture, leave these two alone and use Temp Shift (+warm) and Tint Shift (+magenta) in the Exposure & Balance group. That way you always have a real zero to come back to.
Show Diagnostics replaces the picture with a measurement overlay. Exposure Heatmap in Stops, Exposure Curve and Skin Analysis read the plate at Balance, before the film look runs, and stop the chain there. The Exposure Curve draws on a ruled scale with mid-gray marked, so its reading sits on numbers rather than guesswork. The two Output entries let the whole chain run and measure what leaves it — Output Exposure in Stops for exposure, Output Skin Analysis for skin. The two readings are allowed to differ, and the difference is exactly what the Output modes are for. Both skin overlays print, in their bottom band, where the skin landed on the exposure scale in stops relative to 18 percent gray — the same stops Exposure, Exposure Trim and Print Exposure (stops) are dialed in. It is a measurement of where skin sits, not an instruction. Nothing is ever written for you.
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:
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 Temp Shift (+warm) or Tint Shift (+magenta) to fix what the print did: they act before the film, so they re-balance the whole scene to fix one face. Order matters too: lights set before the input is honest chase a moving target, and on a frame holding more than one population that chase ends at the NOT UNIFORM refusal.
So here is the rule to keep, because this screen is misread in exactly one way: on the Output Skin screen, 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 Kelvin + Tint first. Adjust printer lights to taste. Then match with other shots.
1. Balance. Kelvin and Tint on every shot, until the Skin Analysis solve reads zero.
2. Grade the hero. Printer lights to taste on your best shot. Its Output Skin numbers — the R/B points and the stops line — are now your match target.
3. Match. On every other shot of that subject: Sample Point on the same cheek, drive the readout to the hero's numbers. Kelvin 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.
The cast reading on the Skin Analysis screen assumes the brightest things in frame are neutral, so large bright colored areas or blown highlights skew it. That is a different method from Auto Balance, which reads edges, and the two can disagree. It prints two numbers, such as +380 - 12: the first is the Temp Shift (+warm) value that would neutralize the cast — in mired, that control's unit, not Kelvin — and the second is the Tint Shift (+magenta) value. The cast reading isn't smoothed between frames and is never saved in a preset. It is a viewing aid.
Your host's scopes only see the finished image. This one can read the chain at a point you choose (see Scope Reads From), for example right after the camera decode, before any grading.
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 bottom-right at 36 percent of picture width and does not draw at all below about 245 pixels of delivered width, so a quarter-resolution preview shows no box rather than an illegible one. It also stands down entirely while any other diagnostic is reading the frame — Show Diagnostics in any mode, any Show checkbox, 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; switch the other readout off and the scope comes back.
Four instruments. The menu opens on the Vectorscope.
Tonal scopes have a 0–100 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 now the Show Tone Curves checkbox in Utility.
That the scope reads the tone-and-color chain, not the rendered picture. Grain, Dirt, Halation, Diffusion, MTF, Adjacency, Dye Cloud, Local Contrast, Denoise, Vignette, Gate Weave and Flicker are all absent from every reading. What you are looking at is the transfer at that tap. 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.
Use Skin Sample Point turns it on; Sample Point is where it reads. With it on, every skin reading uses a 9×9-pixel patch under the crosshair instead of the whole frame. That covers Skin Analysis's Kelvin and tint, Output Skin Analysis's printer lights and stops, the reference patch, and the vectorscope's skin X. The crosshair is drawn on the skin screens themselves, so you can see where the numbers come from.
Moving it: drag the crosshair in the viewer, or type the X/Y values. In Premiere and After Effects it drags like any point control. In DaVinci Resolve, 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; if the crosshair shows but won't grab, set that menu and drag again.
Why: on a face at the beach, a frame-wide average mixes skin with warm sand. Pointing at the cheek leaves the sand out. The reading is the patch's median, so a highlight or an eyelash can't move it — more than half the patch has to change before the number does.
Good to know:
Premiere: click "Use Skin Sample Point" in Effect Controls to arm the crosshair — Premiere's own idiom for point parameters. Resolve: no activation step; drag the amber-ringed handle in the viewer, and one drag is one undo.
Diagnose the stage, correct at the stage — Scope Reads From tells you which stage owns it.
1. Degrees first. A warm cast inflates chroma. Fix Kelvin 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 the tap.
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.
Where in the chain the scope reads. Output (delivered) is the delivered image in whatever Output is set to — the everyday reading, live after Balance. Camera (after decode) is the working-space image the moment the decode ends, before Balance: the only place to see what the decode alone did, and where clipping, headroom and stops read in log. This is the control the whole feature exists for; no host scope can show you any tap but the last one. Flipping the tap is how you route a problem to its owning stage: hot at Camera means it arrived in the source, clean at Camera but hot at Output means a film stage is doing it.
Try this: switch Film Stock and Print off and set Scope Reads From to Output (delivered) — that is a clean balance scope for your source.
When you want a fast, checkable starting point on an unfamiliar clip. Set it to Estimate from this frame: it estimates what the scene was lit at from the frame you are parked on, writes it into Source (As Shot) Kelvin and Tint, and returns both Shift dials to zero so you still have a clean zero to trim from. It runs once, on that frame — nothing tracks the picture over time, so a cut or a lighting change does not move it until you fire it again. It reads the color of the edges in the frame and assumes they average out neutral. That is a better assumption than assuming the brightest things are neutral, but it is still an assumption: heavy foliage, a single-gel interior, a red wall against a red sky will pull it. A frame with almost no detail — fog, a blank wall, heavy defocus — gives it nothing, and it will decline and leave your dials alone. The label says "(est.)", short for estimate, for a reason.
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.
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.
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.
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 cube. A LUT is a per-pixel color mapping, so it carries the color pipeline exactly — 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.
Try this: turn on Show Tone Curves in the Utility group. It evaluates the same chain the exporter bakes, so what you see there is what the LUT will carry.
It turns the exposure and white-balance 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.
It is a fine exposure trim in stops on top of the main Exposure — the same kind of move, with a smaller range for landing it. One stop here is exactly one stop, in every working space and at every brightness. Use Exposure to get close and this to finish.
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.
These are the trim half of the two-dial white balance: they warm, cool or shift green-magenta without touching what you declared the scene was lit at. Temp Shift is the color temperature shift. The labels name the direction: positive Temp Shift warms, positive Tint Shift goes magenta (negative cools and goes green). Temp Shift works in mired, the unit lighting gels are sold in (see the glossary), so one step is the same size of correction at every source temperature — about +167 is a full CTO, about −131 a full CTB, and 0 is exactly the white you declared. Tint Shift trims green-magenta on top of the as-shot Tint, and 0 leaves the declaration untouched.
Try this: declare with the Source dials, taste with the Shift dials. Auto Balance zeroes the Shift dials on purpose, so you always have a clean starting point.
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 Shift (+magenta). Both are measured in the chain's reference log, so the same setting is the same shift in every working space.
When a source needs a correction the temperature model does not reach — a heavy or technical cast the Kelvin and Tint axes simply do not describe. They are direct channel gains in stops on top of the Kelvin and Tint solution, and they still run before the film stock. Three balance-shaped instruments exist in this plugin and reaching for the wrong one is the commonest way to get lost, so: set the scene neutral with the Source and Shift dials; use these Gains for a big cast those axes leave behind; and if the problem only appeared after the stock and print ran, correct it with the Printer Lights in the Print group instead.
Balance Strength blends the whole balance result against the untouched input — lower it when the correction is right in direction but too strong. Bypass Exposure (A/B) and Bypass WB (A/B) (WB is white balance) are expert A/B switches: each bypasses one half of the Balance stage while leaving the other running (the group's on/off is still the Balance switch), so you can see what the exposure move alone or the white-balance move alone is contributing. They are for comparison and are never stored in a preset.
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 and Output Skin Analysis overlays tint. It does not affect the numbers those overlays print, and the paint always stays frame-wide even when a Sample Point is directing the numbers at one face. Nothing here touches the rendered image.
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.
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.
Auto measures the noise level from your footage itself, every frame, and usually gets closer than a preset ever could because it is looking at your camera rather than someone else's. It errs slightly low on purpose: under-estimating leaves a little noise, over-estimating smears movement. As of v2.173.0 Auto also reads the shadows correctly on dark frames — a dim interior with a bright window, a night exterior, log exposed to protect the highlights — where it used to read them well under their true level; so with Chroma Denoise on, it now cleans the shadows as intended instead of leaving color noise behind in them. Manual is unchanged. Switch to Manual when you already know the number, or when a shot is unusual enough to argue with — that hands control to the Noise Level slider below.
The expected noise level at mid-gray, as a percentage of mid-gray. Set it to match your source: too low leaves noise, too high smears detail. It does double duty — it is also the yardstick the temporal filter measures neighboring frames against, so setting it too high makes moving objects trail as well as smearing detail. Manual profile only; while Noise Profile is on Auto this slider is not reaching the picture.
Shadow Bias is the shadow noise bias: it 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. Gain Share is the gain noise share: it sets how much of the noise is treated as a fixed gain term rather than as exposure-dependent. Both are Manual profile only.
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. As of v2.172.0 it no longer bleeds 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 now 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 on by default.
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, and draft and thumbnail renders skip them too, so a reduced-resolution preview can differ from your export. In Premiere it also needs the GPU render path: on Software Only, check a frame before trusting it.
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 Strength is how much of the result to use. Lowering it doesn't make rendering faster. 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 Strength down rather than narrowing the window.
Both are readouts drawn over the picture, and neither changes the render underneath. Show Noise Reading prints the noise measurement — what Auto measured on this frame — the noise level as a percentage of mid-gray (the same number the Noise Level slider takes), the gain component (the GAIN SHR line), how many tone levels voted (the TONES line, out of 12), and (since v2.173.0) the shadow bias it fitted, as the number the Shadow Bias slider takes — it never reads below .004, the floor Auto keeps. Two tones on a flat sky and twelve on a full ladder are not the same estimate, so the count is worth as much as the value; if it reads MANUAL / NO FIT, the estimator declined and the three Manual sliders are what is actually running. Show 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 ten reasons in one line — including BELOW FULL RES, DRAFT RENDER, SOFTWARE PATH and GPU MEMORY. 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.
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. 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. Out of the box, with the module switched on, the popup rests on Black PM 1/8 — 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 Black PM 1/8, not Manual. Select Manual and the slider comes alive.
How much of the diffusion filter's flat milky veil comes with the halo (not to be confused with Lens Veil in Exposure & Balance 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.
A diagnostic overlay of which parts of the frame are throwing the glow. 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 Amount 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. Glow Spread is how far the glow spreads.
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. Both cost no brightness at any setting: the glow delivers the same light and only moves color around.
Shadow Lift 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. Lift Threshold is how far up the tone scale that lift reaches before it fades out. Contrast Reduction 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. Texture Soften softens fine texture without blooming it — the skin-smoothing half of a diffusion filter.
It reshapes the halo's fall-off, and it affects the halo only, not the veil. It does not extend the glow's reach: measured against real filter footage it slightly tightens the halo, moving weight inward. Leave it at 0 unless you want that. If you want a genuinely wider reach, this is not the control that can give it to you — use Glow Spread.
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.
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 still 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 now reads the way the chain runs — Color Grade, then Film Stock, then Print. The preset popup 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 offset and 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.
They offset a channel across the whole image, the way a color timer dials a printer light rather than a lift or a gain — but applied before the film stock, so it is an analogy and not a lab unit (the panel's order now shows you exactly that). They are measured in the chain's reference log, so the same setting is the same offset in every working space. If you want real printer points, use the Printer Lights in the Print group. Any preset other than Manual sets these for you.
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, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue 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:
The scope taps route you: hot at Camera is a source problem; clean at Camera but hot at Output 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: 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. Highlight Desat Start moves the point where that desaturation begins — negative starts it earlier (and so widens the region it acts on), positive holds full color further up. Highlight Sat Rolloff is the strength of the highlight rolloff — how much saturation it removes across that region; 0 switches it off entirely, higher removes more. It does not change how gradual the transition is; the onset does that.
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.) This has always happened whenever the group was switched on; until it was exposed as a control it was fixed and hidden. The default is exactly the old fixed amount, so leaving it alone changes nothing. 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 switch turns the film stock's color character on. With it off, the Stock selection above 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 once the Print stage is on. With Print off 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. Contrast Trim negative flattens toward a softer negative, positive steepens toward a punchier one. 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.
They add a split tone on top of the stock's own — warm on positive, cool on negative, in the shadows and the highlights respectively. Like the stock's own split tone they are measured in the chain's reference log, so the same setting is the same color shift in every working space.
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 is down — the curve you are looking at is not reaching the picture — and NEG CURVES when it is. Diagnostic only; it changes nothing about the render underneath it.
They simulate developing the negative longer or shorter than normal, which changes contrast and shadow density together. Push/Pull (stops) is how many stops: positive pushes, raising contrast and coarsening grain; negative pulls, flattening the image. Push Pull Strength blends the pushed or pulled result against the normally developed negative.
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.
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 measured amount, size and tonal weighting, taken from that film's granularity data — so the differences between entries are the differences between the emulsions, 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.
Because Grain Stock sets both on every entry except Manual — and Match Stock is an entry, so on the shipped default these sliders are not reaching the picture. Set Grain Stock to Manual and they come alive. Grain Size is how large the individual grains are: larger reads as a smaller gauge or a faster stock. 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. Softness (Manual), the grain softness, softens the grain the way a lens or a scan would; at 0 it is as crisp as the model makes it.
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. Honest caveat: the negative position only images the grain through the print when Print Softness is on and the delivery is large enough — a long edge of 3840 and up at 35mm, 1920 and up at Super 16, always at Super 8. Below those sizes, or with Print Softness off, the two positions differ in tone rather than in imaging.
It was removed in v2.157.0, and here is the honest reason: the overlay described a grain-amplitude model the shipped grain no longer used — its code never read the grain that actually renders — so it was drawing a picture of nothing. We would rather remove an instrument than let it claim a measurement it does not make. If you had it ticked in an old project, nothing about your rendered grain changes; only the overlay is gone.
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. Grain Color is how much the grain differs between the color records — negative pulls it toward neutral, positive lets each layer's grain read as its own color. Grain Color is Manual-only, 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 is the amplitude of the fine layer, which carries the high-frequency sparkle; Coarse Grain 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.
It was removed before launch, and here is the honest reason: it had done nothing since version 2.87. It fed a density-based grain amplitude model that Decoloris no longer uses — the grain tone response is weighted by shadow, midtone and highlight zones instead — so nothing read its value, and the panel labeled it "(inert)". We would rather remove a dead control than leave it for you to chase. A preset file that still carries its value loads normally; the value is simply skipped, and your grain is unchanged.
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: how bright a highlight has to be before it starts to halate, set in stops over mid-gray — the same scale the Show Halation Sources key strip 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 (+1.85) is the same brightness the old scale called 0.65. Note the "(Manual)" in the label: Halation Stock sets it on every entry except Manual, and Match Stock is an entry, so on the shipped default it is not reaching the picture. 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.
A diagnostic overlay of which highlights are driving halation, 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 keeps the red halo the plugin shipped before, which is 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 are used; Match Stock derives it from your main Stock selection. The label carries the honesty: the emulsion blur radii are whole pixels, so below 4K most of these entries deliver the same picture as each other and some deliver nothing at all. Judge a choice here at delivery resolution, not on an HD preview. 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 Print on.
Whether you can see it depends on gauge and resolution, and that's physics: the blur has to reach a whole pixel. The "4K+" in the label is the 35mm figure: at 35mm that means 4K and up, so at HD it does nothing. Super 16 needs about half that width, and Super 8 less. 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 the adjacency amount: how strong the edge effect is — higher values give film's characteristic bite at high-contrast boundaries — and, as the label says, Adjacency Stock sets it on every entry except Manual, with Match Stock being an entry. 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.
A diagnostic overlay of where the adjacency stage is finding edges, with a legend that declares its scale. 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.
A diagnostic overlay of the dye cloud field itself, with a legend that declares its scale. 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.
Amount (white=neg) 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 Share (print) sets how much of that dirt is dark rather than bright. The labels carry where each kind of speck came from — white specks come from the negative, black specks from the print: 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.
They were removed before launch. Both had done nothing since the dirt was rebuilt around Particle Opacity — both kinds of particle now land at that one opacity, on the negative and on the print alike, so there was no blend law left to choose — and the panel labeled them "(retired)". A preset file that still carries their values loads normally; the values are simply skipped, and your dirt is unchanged.
It turns the print stage on: the negative is printed onto Teatro 2383 release stock, which is where most of film's contrast and color signature actually comes from. The strength of that print is the Print Strength fader at the top of the panel.
How the negative is exposed onto the print, in stops — the printer's exposure, not the camera's (that is Exposure at the top of the panel). Positive prints brighter and thinner; negative prints darker and denser. Expert note worth having: +1.0 exposure with 0.20 paper-light trims is the classic highlight-protect print-down.
A printer point is the unit lab color timers work in.
Try this: steer with these last. Set white balance at Balance before the stock, fix a large overall cast with the WB Red / Blue Gains, and use the Printer Lights for what the stock and print did to skin — Output Skin Analysis reads that correction out for you in these same points. The order is the doctrine: make the input honest at Kelvin and Tint, verify with the Sample Point, then let these lights place your skin on the print — solved from your point when one is placed. If the correction runs big, the fix is upstream at Kelvin 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 the default strength. 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 1, 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.
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 the look the plugin shipped before, built from a shadow lift and a highlight tint that were tuned by eye rather than derived. It is kept so an existing grade can be reproduced — 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. 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. 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. Flicker Strength blends the flickering result against the steady image.
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.
It is on by default and it should stay on. It sets how finely the textured stages are sampled — halation, diffusion, grain, local contrast and dirt. Turning it off is a faster preview, not a milder look: the halo geometry and the grain amplitude are the same either way, and only the smoothness of the sampling changes. Grain matches the final render at any preview size. Your host may already be lowering this 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 exposure, the fade and the dye cloud together do to tone at the point Scope Reads From is set to. 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: move Print Exposure (stops) in the Print group and watch the whole curve slide; pull Fade and watch the toe lift off the floor. It sits at the opposite corner from the scope, so both boxes can be up at once — and it lives here in Utility because it is a study tool for the deep-color reader, not a grading scope. 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.
Trial watermark, licensing and pricing — deliberately not drafted. No trial, license or watermark control appears in the shipped panel table, so nothing in the walkthrough above needed skipping. If any trial messaging surfaces to the user (a mark on the frame, a dialog, a status string), it needs its own FAQ section written to the same honesty standard, and it is not written here.
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