Looks & Controls

This page covers the controls in both of Three/Strip™‘s processes. Start with the process switch and a Look preset, set Vibrancy and Blend, then reach for the fine controls only when a shot needs them.

Process Emulation

The Process Emulation dropdown, just below Color Management, chooses which engine runs.

Three Strip models the full three-color dye-transfer process. Two Strip models the earlier two-color process. Changing this shows the controls for that engine and hides the other set, so the panel only ever shows what applies.

Shared controls

These stay visible in both processes.

Vibrancy is the one-knob color control. In Three Strip it drives Dye Character, Richness, and Saturation together; in Two Strip it drives Dye Intensity. Either way, one knob moves the intensity of the look, so set it here first and fine-tune the individual sliders only if you need to.

Blend mixes the emulation against your original image. At 1.0 you see the full dye model; lower it to let your graded image through, and at 0 the model drops out. Three/Strip applies the dye model at its default settings, so Blend is how you dial that contribution up and down.

Three Strip

Look

The Look dropdown sets the main sliders to a preset starting point. It offers four named presets plus Custom, and moving most of the sliders it set switches the dropdown to Custom.

Each named Look tunes the main character controls to a different period look. Pick the one closest to what you want, then adjust from there.

Character controls

Warmth sets the warmth of the print base: golden whites and skin to the right, cooler to the left, with 0 neutral. Contrast changes the contrast of the film response around a mid-gray pivot. Richness deepens the dye color by adding density, so strong settings darken and slightly shift the colored areas. Dye Character increases the dye cross-absorption the model borrows from the Technicolor dye set; higher values bend the hues further and mute the palette. Dye Depth deepens the dye in the shadows, bending hue and pinching saturation as density rises. Saturation fades toward neutral below 1 and deepens above it, working inside the dye-density model rather than as a separate trim. Color Softness softens the color separation toward the older beam-splitter camera response; 0 is a modern clean separation. Black Density deepens the shadows with a neutral key drawn from the green record, the way an early silver layer did. It holds around mid-gray, though it can darken skin that falls in those shadows. Skin Protect eases Dye Character and the Richness and Saturation gain on pixels in the skin hue and lightness range, so pushing the look hard drags faces less.

Two Strip

Look

The Two Strip presets are starting points. Archival is a warm, richly boosted two-dye color. Aviator is a cooler, more stylized look. Editing one of the preset sliders switches the dropdown to Custom.

Character controls

Dye Intensity sets the color intensity of the two-dye print. At 1.0 you get the model’s unboosted two-dye response; higher values exaggerate the two-color separation. Contrast sets the contrast of the film response and pivots at mid-gray. Warmth is the process white balance: 0 is the period warm print base, positive warms it further, and negative cools it toward an aqua look. Skin Protect eases the Dye Intensity on skin-range pixels, so faces hold when you push the dye hard.

Color Management

Both processes decode your image first, so set these to match what is coming in.

Set the Transfer Function to match the image arriving at this node, including any conversion an earlier node already applied. Matching it matters: a wrong curve makes the plugin decode the image incorrectly, which can show up as noise or banding. Gamut is the color space of that same image. The Link Gamut / Transfer Function option, on by default, derives the Gamut from the Transfer Function so the two stay consistent.

Advanced tools

The Advanced group also holds a few shared refinements. Skin Offset shifts which skin tone the Skin Protect controls target, lighter or darker. Gamut Compress pulls out-of-gamut colors back toward the boundary with an ACES-style compression, and ships off by default. Clamp Negatives floors negative color values at zero, applied after the blend and before the output conversion; it is off by default to avoid that extra clipping.

Next

The Resolve Quick Start puts these controls in order on a real shot.