Film

The negative is where the image becomes film. Everything after it works on what the negative recorded. Pick a different stock and you change how color and tone were captured in the first place, which is a bigger move than anything the print can do afterward. The Negative tab is small, one menu and two sliders, and it has the most influence on the picture of any tab except Camera.

What the stage does

The Negative stage takes the scene-referred image the plugin was given, exposes it onto the chosen stock, and hands the developed negative to the Print stage. It needs to know what it is looking at, which is why Color Management comes first: a stock’s response is measured against light, and the stage undoes the camera’s encoding before the film sees it. Feed it a display-referred image and the negative is exposed to something that was never a scene. That is covered in Color Management.

Two of the Lab tab’s controls act inside this stage even though they live on another tab. Push/Pull changes how the negative is exposed and developed, Layer Color Coupling changes how much the layers influence each other, and both are applied around the stock’s own rendering. The Lab guide covers them. The stock’s grain is not modeled here. Grain is its own stage, with its own Film Stock menu, so the texture of a negative is set on the Grain tab.

Negative Stock

Negative Stock picks the film. The menu is grouped by manufacturer and, within Kodak, by family. The number after the name is the stock code, and the letter before it is the balance it was made for: T for tungsten, D for daylight. The speed and balance tell you what a cinematographer would have loaded it for. You do not need to match either one. Balance the image upstream or in Adjustments and choose the stock for how it renders.

• Fuji. Reala 500D and the Eterna family. Fuji negatives of this era run stronger contrast and color than the Kodak stocks they competed with, with their own hue behavior as exposure rises. Eterna Vivid is the punchier end of the family.
• Kodak Vision3. The current family: 500T, 250D, 200T, and 50D. The lowest-contrast modern Kodak negatives, with the closest match between stocks of any family. 500T 5219 is the plugin’s default and the stock most of the movie looks are built on. 50D is the finest-grained of the four.
• Kodak Vision2. 250D, 200T, and 100T. The family that bridged film and digital post, built to hold more highlight detail for scanning, with more consistent color than what came before.
• Kodak Vision. 800T, 500T, and 320T. The first of the modern Kodak families and the highest-contrast of the three Vision generations. 800T was the fastest color negative Kodak made.
• Kodak Ektachrome 100D. A reversal stock, not a negative: the film that comes out of the lab is a positive. It is on the menu for its look, which is higher in contrast and saturation than any negative here, with far less latitude.
• Kodak Eastman EXR 100T. The family before Vision, built to protect highlights and leave their compression to the print. Higher contrast than anything in the Vision families. The stock behind the Vintage 35mm look.
• Kodak Double X. Black-and-white negative. The Monochrome Archive look shows the full setup. The stock does the work of turning the scene monochrome. Saturation at zero in Adjustments makes sure no color reaches it, and Silver Halide Mode on the Grain tab gives it a monochrome grain to match.
• Agfa. Vista 200 and XT 320T, two Agfa color negatives that render color differently from both Kodak and Fuji.
• Kodak Aerocolor IV. An aerial-survey negative with a dyed gel backing in place of rem-jet, which is why it shows far more halation than a motion-picture stock when respooled for cameras. This stage models its color and tone. On the Halation tab, Vintage Dye is the closest match to its backing; No Backing pushes the respooled halation further.

Every Film Look sets this menu as part of its recipe. Change the stock under a look and the Film Look menu reads Custom, with everything else in the recipe left where it was. That is a normal way to work: keep a look’s print, halation, and grain and try its stock against a different one.

Intensity and Opacity

Intensity scales how much of the stock’s rendering is applied. At the top of the range the image is exposed onto the stock in full. Lower it and the recorded image moves back toward the scene as it came in, so the stock’s color and tone shaping fade while the rest of the stage keeps working. Intensity also scales the stock’s native layer coupling with it, so a negative at low intensity does not carry coupling it never recorded.

Opacity blends the whole stage against its input, including the Lab processing that runs inside it. At zero, Push/Pull, coupling, and the stock are all gone together and the image passes through untouched. Use Opacity to fade a negative setup you like; use Intensity when the stock itself is too strong but you want the push or the coupling to stay.

Enable takes the stage out of the chain entirely. With the negative off and the print on, the print stock is exposed directly from the scene, which is not a combination film could produce but is a useful isolation: it shows you what the print alone is contributing.

Controls

Working with the negative

Choose the stock before you touch the print. The negative decides what the print has to work with, and a print stock timed for one negative will need re-timing for another. A lab timed a show in the same order: negative first, then the print stock, then the printer lights.

Judge a stock change on skin and on a saturated primary. A grey chart hides the difference. Stocks differ most in how the three layers separate color and in how they roll into the shoulder, and a chart hides both.

Do not use Intensity as a saturation control. It is a blend toward the ungraded scene, so lowering it pulls the tone curve back as well as the color. If a stock’s color is right and its contrast is not, the Print tab and Push/Pull are the tools.

What the Negative tab cannot do

There is no grain here. The Grain stage has its own Film Stock menu, so the texture of a stock is chosen there, and the two menus do not have to agree.

Push, pull, and coupling act inside the negative but their controls live on the Lab tab.

The tab has no white-balance or filter control. The plugin models each stock’s response to a correctly exposed scene, and the T and D in a stock’s name describe the film rather than a correction the stage applies.

Next: Print covers the release print, the three print stocks, and timing with printer lights.