Overview

Film/Emulsion™ runs your image through the chain a shot used to go through: camera negative, lab, release print, then the halation and grain that came with it. Each step is in the plugin. The lab is not a stage of its own; its controls fold into Negative and Print.

This page covers the stages, the tabs, and the three master controls.

The light path

Light reaches the plugin as the image on your node. From there it moves through five stages in a fixed order.

1. Adjustments. The camera end of the chain. Exposure, contrast, saturation, temperature, and tint are applied here, before any film is involved, so every later stage sees the corrected scene. Black Level sits in the same group but is applied inside the print stage, as a shadow fill. It is the one control in this group that runs inside the Print stage, and it follows the print’s Enable and Opacity.
2. Negative. The image exposes a camera negative. You pick the stock; the stock decides how color and tone are recorded. The Lab tab’s controls act here: Push/Pull compensates exposure and development the way a push or pull process would, and Layer Color Coupling adjusts how much the three layers influence each other. The Lab tab’s Process control (bleach-bypass variants and cross-process) is applied later, inside Print.
3. Print. The developed negative is printed onto a release stock, which shapes the contrast and color of the printed image. Printer Master, Red, Green, and Blue time the shot. With Laboratory Mode off (the default) they move the way a colorist expects: more red makes the image redder. Turn Laboratory Mode on and they behave like a lab’s printer lights, where adding red points removes red.
4. Halation. Bright sources bloom outward into a warm halo, light bouncing back through the emulsion from the base of the film. The plugin renders this after the color chain so the halo is built from the finished image.
5. Grain. Film grain goes over the frame last, sized to the gauge and stock you pick: dye-cloud texture for a color stock, or a sharper monochrome grain when Silver Halide Mode is on.

In the demo, a watermark is composited after grain. On a licensed machine that step does not exist. From Demo to Licensed covers what else changes.

What that order means in practice

Each stage sees the output of the one before it. A change in Adjustments reaches every stage after it, so a stop of exposure there changes how the negative records the scene, how much halation the highlights throw, and where grain shows across the tonal range. A change on the Print tab reaches only print, halation, and grain. This is why the Resolve Quick Start tells you to balance your shots before the node: film’s response to exposure is nonlinear, and so is the model.

Halation and grain run last, on the finished image. They are spatial, so a LUT cannot carry them. Adjustments through Print, with the Lab settings folded in, can be sampled into a .cube LUT in the input space you declared; the cube returns that same space and approximates rather than reproduces the look. The Presets & LUT Export guide will have the details.

Tabs and stages

The inspector has six tabs. Camera holds the setup and master controls: the Color Management group, the Film Look menu and Effect Strength, the preset and LUT files, and the Adjustments group. The other five hold the stage controls, in host order: Negative, Print, Halation, Grain, Lab. Four of them map to a render stage; Lab modifies Negative and Print.

The Lab tab’s group is titled Film Processing in the inspector. Tab order is not render order: whatever tab a control sits on, the image still runs Adjustments, Negative, Print, Halation, Grain.

Enable. Negative, Print, Halation, Grain, and Lab each have an Enable switch at the top, and the Adjustments group has one too. Enable takes the stage out of the chain, with one exception. Lab is not a stage, so its Enable neutralizes the Lab settings inside Negative and Print.

Opacity. Negative, Print, Halation, and Grain also have an Opacity slider. It blends the stage’s result against its input, so you can run a print at half strength or fade the grain without changing how it was generated.

Two isolation setups worth knowing:

• Print off: you are looking at the developed negative, with whatever halation and grain you left on.
• Negative and Print off, Halation and Grain on: film texture over your own color pipeline. The Grain guide covers that setup.

The Clean Slate preset switches every stage off at once, the starting point for building a look one stage at a time.

The three masters

Three controls do most of the work on most shots: Film Look and Effect Strength on the Camera tab, and Quality on the Grain tab. Learn these first.

Film Look

Film Look is a menu of 29 looks plus No Preset. Each one sets every control a look owns at once: stocks, lab, adjustments, halation, grain. The halation and grain belong to the recipe rather than sitting on top of it. A Super 8 home movie look and a modern 35mm look arrive with different backings, gauges, and grain stocks before you touch a slider. Picking one is the quickest route to a finished look, and a good way to learn the plugin: open each tab afterward and see what the look is made of.

A look does not own the setup. Color Management, Quality, Effect Strength, and the per-stage Opacity sliders stay as you set them. The Halation tab’s Simple/Advanced mode is not stored either, though a look the Simple sliders cannot express will switch the tab to Advanced.

Edit any control a look owns and the menu reads Custom. Nothing is lost; the preset no longer describes what is on the node. The Film Looks Library guide will describe all 29.

Effect Strength

Effect Strength is a master fader for the film. At 100 the chain runs exactly as the preset or your settings describe. Pull it down and Negative, Print, Halation, and Grain ease off together: it scales each stage’s Opacity in proportion, so the whole look fades as one thing.

Adjustments sit outside the fade and stay fully applied at any Effect Strength, with one exception. Black Level follows Effect Strength because it acts inside the print. The rest of the group is scene correction. If you want the whole plugin to back off, drop Effect Strength, then revisit Adjustments separately.

When a preset feels heavy on your footage, this is the first control to reach for. It is also the right control for a timeline-level or group-level node, where one global fade is more useful than per-stage tuning.

Quality

Quality has three settings: Extreme, High, and Performance. It changes how the halation and grain stages are rendered, including the brightness a source needs before it halates, and nothing else. The color chain, from Adjustments through Print, renders identically at all three.

Extreme is the full-quality render and the delivery setting. High and Performance are much faster and cost a small amount of fidelity in the halo and the grain. Grade on Performance, render on Extreme. The quick start covers render cost.

Where the plugin sits in the node tree

Give Film/Emulsion™ a node of its own, after balance and primary corrections and before any output transform or creative LUT. It receives a clean, scene-referred image and hands back the print. Windows, keys, and polish go downstream. The quick start explains why balancing first matters. The Grading with Film/Emulsion™ guide will cover multi-node setups and group and timeline-level use.

What the plugin does not model

Film/Emulsion™ models the film’s color and its emulsion texture. It does not model the projector or the display. There is no display transform inside; it hands the printed image back to Resolve in the space it received, and your output transform takes it from there.

It also does not model mechanical artifacts. Gate weave, flicker, dust, and scratches are the job of other tools.

Next: Color Management covers what the plugin expects to receive and how to feed it from Resolve Color Managed, ACES, or an unmanaged log timeline.