Overview

Film/Emulsion™ simulates motion picture film from the camera negative to the print, with the texture that came with it. It takes the light your camera recorded and moves it through a model of the same chain a shot went through in the photochemical era: exposed onto a camera negative, developed at a lab, printed onto a release stock, and then seen with the halation and grain that the physical film brought with it. Each of those steps is represented in the plugin, though the lab is not a stage of its own. Its controls fold into the Negative and Print stages.

This page is the map. It tells you what each stage does, which tab drives it, and how three master controls let you steer the whole chain at once. Every stage has its own guide page for the details.

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 after the print stock, as a print-density floor.
2. Negative. The image exposes a camera negative. You choose the stock, and the stock decides how the scene’s colors and tones are recorded, each stock with its own tone and color response. The Lab tab’s controls act here: Push/Pull compensates exposure and development the way a push or pull process would, Super-White rolls off the highlight shoulder, and Interlayer adjusts the color coupling between the layers. Its Process control (bleach-bypass and cross-process) is applied later, inside the Print stage.
3. Print. The developed negative is printed onto a release stock. The print stock shapes the contrast and color of the printed image, and the Printer Master, Printer Red, Printer Green, and Printer Blue controls let you time the shot the way a lab timer would, with Laboratory Mode enabled. It is off by default, using an intentionally reversed, intuitive polarity instead.
4. Halation. Bright sources bloom outward into a warm halo, the signature of 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. The plugin lays film grain over the frame last, sized to the gauge and the stock you pick: dye-cloud texture for a color stock, or a sharper, monochromatic variant of that same procedural grain field 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 Pro covers what else changes.

What that order means in practice

Because the stages run in sequence, each one sees the output of the one before it. A change in the Adjustments group 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 and how strongly grain is visible 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 responds to exposure non-linearly, and the plugin’s stock transforms are nonlinear too.

Halation and grain run last, after the color chain is finished. They are spatial effects, and the plugin runs them on the finished image. They are the two stages a LUT cannot carry. The Adjustments, Negative, and Print stages, with the Lab settings folded in, can be sampled into a .cube LUT, though a LUT approximates rather than reproduces the look exactly. The cube is baked for the transfer function and gamut you have selected as the input and returns that same space; it is not a separate output transform. Halation and grain cannot be baked into the 3D LUT. Presets & LUT Export will have the details (coming later).

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 tabs hold the stage controls, in host order: Negative, Print, Halation, Grain, Lab. Four of them map directly to a render stage; Lab modifies the Negative and Print stages rather than adding a stage of its own.

The tab order is not the render order. Whatever tab a control sits on, the image still runs Adjustments, Negative, Print, Halation, Grain.

Negative, Print, Halation, Grain, and Lab each have an Enable switch at the top, and the Adjustments group on the Camera tab has one too. Negative, Print, Halation, and Grain also have an Opacity slider. Enable takes the stage out of the chain entirely, with two exceptions. Lab is not a stage of its own, so its Enable neutralizes Lab’s contributions inside Negative and Print rather than removing anything of its own. And Print’s Enable deliberately leaves Adjustments’ Black Level active even with Print off. Opacity 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. Between them they cover the common isolation workflows: switch off Print and you are looking at the developed negative, with whatever halation, grain, and Black Level you left on, switch off Negative and Print and keep Halation and Grain, and you have film texture over your own color pipeline. Texture will cover that last workflow (coming later). The Clean Slate preset switches every stage off at once, the starting point for building a look one stage at a time; the quick start shows where it sits in the Film Look menu.

The three masters

You can take a lot of shots a long way with three controls: 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 preset-owned control at once: the negative stock, the print stock, the lab process, the adjustments, the halation, the grain. Color Management and Quality stay as you set them, and so do the per-stage Opacity sliders and the Halation tab’s Simple/Advanced mode. Those remain user state, not part of the recipe. The halation and grain themselves are part of the recipe, not a layer on top of it. A Super 8 home movie look and a modern 35mm look arrive with different backings, gauges, scatter distances, and grain stocks before you touch a slider. Picking one is the quickest route to a finished look, and it is a good way to learn the plugin, because you can open each tab afterward and see exactly what that look is made of.

Edit any preset-owned control after picking a preset and the menu reads Custom. Nothing is lost. The preset simply no longer describes what is on the node. The Film Looks Library will describe all 29 (coming later).

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 the Negative, Print, Halation, and Grain stages all ease off together: it scales each stage’s Opacity in proportion, so the look gets lighter as one thing.

Adjustments are not part of that fade. Exposure, contrast, temperature, and Black Level stay fully applied at any Effect Strength: Effect Strength scales the four film stages and leaves the Adjustments group alone by design. Most of that group is scene correction. Black Level is the exception: as the stage list above notes, it acts as a post-print density floor rather than a scene correction, but it lives in the Adjustments group and so stays outside the fade with the rest. If you want the whole plugin to back off, drop Effect Strength and then revisit the Adjustments group separately.

When a preset feels heavy on your footage, this is the first control to reach for. It is also a good choice for a timeline-level or group-level node, where a single 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 sampled and approximated, and nothing else. The color chain, from Adjustments through Print, renders identically at all three, so your color-management choices and the Adjustments, Lab, and Print controls are unaffected. Film Look and Effect Strength, on the Camera tab, feed the halation and grain stages, so Quality does change how their contribution is sampled.

Extreme matches the plugin’s reference implementation and is the setting for final delivery. High and Performance are much faster and cost a small amount of fidelity in the halo and the grain. A common pattern is Performance while you grade, Extreme before you render. The quick start covers render cost in more detail.

Where the plugin sits in the node tree

Film/Emulsion™ acts on the whole image on its node, so we recommend giving it a node of its own. Put it after balance and primary corrections and before any output transform or creative LUT, so that what reaches it is a clean, scene-referred image and what leaves it is the print. Windows, keys, and polish belong downstream. Grading with Film/Emulsion™ will walk through single-node and multi-node setups, and through using the plugin at the group and timeline level (coming later).

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 the plugin. It hands the printed image back to Resolve and your output transform takes it from there. That keeps the plugin honest in any color-managed project, and it is why the Color Management group is about input, not output.

It also does not model mechanical artifacts: gate weave, flicker, dust, and scratches are outside this plugin’s scope. It renders the emulsion; those effects are the job of other tools.

Next: Color Management will cover what the plugin expects to receive and how to feed it from ACES, Resolve Color Managed, or an unmanaged log timeline (coming later).