In this video I'm going to show you how to create the popular bleach bypass look in DaVinci Resolve. And in the process we're going to learn about emulating photochemical processes. Bleach bypass, sometimes called skip bleach or silver attention, is a special development process that renders film with higher contrast and lower saturation. To recreate this look digitally, it's really helpful to understand the original photochemical process. I'm no chemist, but here's a quick explanation. Color fi
lms' sensitivity to light is thanks to some clever chemistry and the presence of silver halide crystals. Typically, once a camera negative has been exposed, it is developed with three chemicals. Developer, bleach and fix. Once the film has been passed through the developer chemical, the silver halide has served its purpose and is no longer needed. The bleach and fix step are designed to completely remove the silver from the negative, leaving just the red, green and blue dye records. Bleach bypas
s deviates from the typical development process. Depending on the desired intensity of the effect, the bleach bath can either be skipped completely or partially. Thanks to the retained silver, the resulting negative in effect becomes a combination of a color negative and a black and white negative. The chemistry lesson's done for now, but remember that information because it's going to come in handy later on when we start to create the look. Now, talking of creating looks, it's always really use
ful to have a reference on hand. We're going to use the work of Steven Spielberg. Spielberg and his longtime collaborator, Janis Kaminski, have used the bleach bypass effect on a number of occasions. Here's three examples, Saving Private Ryan, Minority Report and War of the Worlds. We'll consult these references as we go along, but let's get started. Here's the timeline I'm working in. It's not a finished edit, it's got a variety of shots from different videos in. That's going to give us the opp
ortunity to see how versatile the look that we've created is, how it can work on different types of scenes. I've already balanced the shots in this sequence. I'm going to build my creative look in the timeline node tree so that it applies to all the shots in my timeline. Now, please note, this tutorial is all about technique. It's not about the finished result. We're not trying to precisely replicate the look in Steven Spielberg's films, but we are going to pay homage to the bleach bypass look.
A really simplistic approach to building a bleach bypass look might just be to increase contrast and lower saturation. That's actually not too bad, but we can do better. So I'll reset this node. Let's start again. What we're trying to do here is simulate the photochemical process. Remember, a bleach bypass negative is effectively a combination of a color and a black and white image. A layer mixer would be perfect for this. I'll leave one node color and I'll make the other node black and white. A
nd please forgive me for spelling color the British way. Remember, when creating a black and white image, don't just turn the saturation down. The best way to do it is with the monochrome mixer. Now you can hone that black and white look by choosing how the red, green and blue color channels affect the final image. By default, a layer mixer combines nodes using the normal composite mode. Let's set the layer mixers composite mode to overlay and instant bleach bypass. I can further refine this loo
k by manipulating the black and white node. For instance, by affecting its contrast and brightness. I'm going to do that with a custom curve so I have as much control over the image as possible. As well as manipulating the black and white node, I can also manipulate the color node. The image is still way too saturated, but instead of changing its global saturation, I like to use hue versus saturation to selectively desaturate some colors more than others. Because skin tones are so important, I'm
going to go easy on the red and yellows and concentrate on desaturating other colors in the image. These red and yellow buttons are really handy for setting control points to protect those colors. Just those few simple steps have had a massive impact on the image, but we're not done yet. Let's consult our references. As bleach bypass is traditionally seen on film, the film aesthetic is a big part of its look. Our look is missing elements like grain, halation, that sparkle you get from film that
's not completely clean when it's scanned, and perhaps the glowy softness of a vintage lens. Let's start with halation. That's the signature red glow that you get around bright parts of an image, especially when they're photographed against a dark background. Halation is caused by light that has traveled all the way through the negative, bouncing off the pressure plate. The diffused light then begins to travel back through the negative. As the red die layer is closest to that pressure plate, it
gets most affected by this bounced light, hence the red glow. There's an open FX in Resolve Studio for producing this phenomenon. No points for guessing what it's called. It's called halation. The default settings look pretty good. You can see that the highlights in my image now have that distinctive red glow around them. Changing the threshold can help you to match the halation to the overall exposure of your edit. Now here's something to think about. Consider the steps involved in capturing an
image on film and developing it. At what point in that process does halation occur? It's when the film is being exposed in the camera. The bleach bypass process is applied afterwards, so it's going to affect how that halation renders in the final film. It's going to make it more contrasty and less saturated. What I need to do is move the halation effect so that it happens before my bleach bypass. It's really easy to swap nodes in Resolve. Just hold down on the command or control key and drag on
e node on top of another. That's better. The halation is still visible, but it's as you'd expect it to look after a bleach bypass has been applied. Let's add a subtle glow next. This isn't something that is necessarily unique to bleach bypass or even shooting on film, but there's a really nice glow in our reference images. Saving Private Ryan used lenses with their coatings removed. In Minority Report and War of the Worlds there's definitely some sort of filtration on the lens that's producing t
hose beautiful highlight blooms. Maybe a promised filter or a blacknet. To replicate this I'm going to use the Resolve Glow Effects. I like setting the output to glow alone while adjusting the settings. It helps me to see what's going on in the image. At the moment the shine threshold is too high to capture any of the highlights in the image. Let's lower it. I don't want the glow to be too diffuse either, so I'm going to limit the spread. Don't forget to turn the output back to that final glowin
g image. There's one last thing I'd like to adjust. By default the glow effect uses the Add Composite mode to combine the glow back with the original image. You'll see though that in the Add Composite mode it's really easy for highlights to blow out. I usually like to switch the composite mode to Screen. Those glowing highlights are now much softer and have a roll-off that is more typical of film. Grain is another vital component of the film aesthetic and there's an open effects for that too. Wi
th grain it can be really tempting to overcook it, so let's be careful. For the sake of this example I am going to make the grain more prominent than I usually would. That's just because I want it to be obvious what we're doing and also sometimes when you upload a tutorial like this to YouTube the compression can mask the grain. Let's add a new node and set it up. These presets are a great starting point. I'm going to use 35 millimeter grain because it's a little bit more subtle. Hey here 16 mil
and 35 mil grain they're kind of the same thing really it's just on a 16 mil negative the grain always appears larger because you have to magnify the image more for it to be the same size as a 35 mil image. So here goes I'm going to dial up the grain strength and zoom in so we can see what it looks like. You might be thinking hold on how come the halation effect needed to be placed before the bleach bypass effect but these other effects you're putting afterwards. Well the placement of the halat
ion effect was important because it is manipulating the color of the image but it's less important with these glow and grain effects. Let's have a little watch to see what it looks like thus far. I'm glad we stopped to watch through some of the footage because that glow is way too intense for me so let's tweak it before we go any further. Let's reduce the spread and turn down the gain a little bit now that's looking much better. Let's audition that off and on and check it on some of the other im
ages in our sequence. That's looking much better I'm glad we spotted that. Now we're going to do something really fun. You'll notice in this reference still from saving Private Ryan there is a really unusual vertical flare in the image. These flares are not caused by the bleach bypass process neither are they inherent to film. This is a characteristic of the lenses that Kaminsky used to shoot the film. Remember we said he had lenses modified and coatings removed before shooting the film. I think
this would be a really fun element to incorporate into our grade. Beforehand it would have taken me two or three nodes to create this look but thanks to a new feature in 18.5 I can now do this in a single node. Add a new serial node, apply the glow effect. Just like before set the output to glow alone but this time we're actually going to leave it in that mode and then change the hv ratio to stretch the glow vertically. Now right click on the node and change its composite mode to screen. Now yo
u might be wondering why I'm setting the node up this way using the node composite mode rather than just using the composite mode in the glow effect. It's because it gives me more power to tweak the look of this flare that I'm creating. For example I can use the custom curve to affect the contrast of that flare or use my primary color wheels to give it a color tint. Yeah I can do those things to a certain extent in the glow effect but now I have a little bit more control. Don't forget the abilit
y to change the composite mode of a corrector node is a brand new feature in version 18.5. Let's do a little housekeeping and name the node. And finally this effect is in the wrong place in my image pipeline. Remember this flare is being added in the camera's lens before it even hits the negative. Now in particular it can benefit from the halation and the glow effect. Let's see how it's looking. I really like it. It does work better in some shots than it does in others. I think it works best on
scenes that have lots of contrast like that first shot where you're in a dark room and you've got the bright light coming through the windows. Now the next step that we're going to do isn't strictly necessary. It's not an element of film per se but often when film gets scanned even if there's just a tiny bit of dirt on the negative it will sharp as a nice sparkle in the scan. So let's add that effect. The film damage effect can help us to simulate this. Again it's another studio feature. By defa
ult though this effect adds too much damage to the film. I'll turn off the film blur, temperature shift, tint shift, the vignette and the scratches. Let's reduce the dirt density and finally because I've decided to simulate dirt on a negative I need to change the dirt color from black to white. It's good. It's looking a little bit too intense so I'm going to turn down the blend to 50 percent. This is looking really good. I know we've added a lot of nodes but there's just one more thing that I wa
nt to do. Like all film the stock they used for print releases had a particular look. When you printed images onto it it would imbue the image with some of its own characteristics. One of the most popular stocks used for print releases was Kodak 2383 and it just so happens that Resolve comes bundled with a lot for emulating it. Here they are. Let's apply it to the last node in my image chain. Whoa that looks pretty bad. Do you know why? LUTs are designed to work in a particular color space but u
nfortunately they don't carry any metadata that Resolve can read so it can correctly color manage the image before the LUT is applied. That's why LUTs often have those long-winded names that include the color spaces that they're designed to work in. This one does say Rec.709 but I suspect that that's the color space that it's designed to output in not the input color space that it's looking for. Sometimes people put that information inside the LUT as a comment. Let's right click on the LUT and g
o to Reveal in Finder and open the LUT in a text editor. These hash marks at the beginning of the file indicate comments. Aha here you go. You can see it's designed to work with a cineon log image. That makes a lot of sense because cineon log is the format that is usually used when film images are scanned. I'm working in a color managed environment but my timeline is set to Rec.709. That's why this LUT isn't working. I can use a color space transform to transform my image from Rec.709 to cineon
log before this LUT gets applied. Let's set that up. I'll add a serial node before do a little bit of housekeeping, apply the color space transform effect and set its output gamma to cineon film log. Output gamma to cineon film log. That's better. The image isn't being crushed and blown out like it was before but it still needs some work because this film emulation is evidently designed to work with a darker image than the one that we're supplying it. There's no need to go back and change your p
rimary grades. In a scenario like this I like to make an adjustment node. I'll use it to bring the gamma down before it goes through the LUT and sometimes film emulations change your black and white point. There's nothing wrong with placing an adjustment node after it to refine your black and white levels back to where you want them to be. If the film look is a little too strong for you you can always mix it back in with the original image. In effect turn down the opacity of the LUT. Now because
I'm using four nodes to apply this film emulation LUT I can't just mix it in by changing the key output gain on just the LUT node. This is a little bit more complex but I'll need to use a layer mixer to mix my film emulation back with the non-film emulation or rec.709 image. Now I can affect the opacity of my film look with the key output for the last node in my film emulation branch. There you go. Let's see how this looks on my footage. I love it. Now you might think that's a lot of work but r
emember you only have to do this once for your entire project or maybe perhaps at worst tweak it for each scene. The key to emulating this look was to understand the photochemical process that was used by its inventors. By breaking down the look into its constituent components we were able to recreate them in DaVinci Resolve. We used a whole bunch of studio features to create this look but you know what it's actually possible to do pretty much all of this with the free version of Resolve. If you
'd like to see another video where we show you how to do that please leave a comment down below. Now we hope you liked the video. It takes us time to put these videos together so we really appreciate it if you can give the video a like perhaps share it with someone else who you think it might be useful to. If you have any questions leave them down in the comments and please make sure you subscribe so you don't miss future videos. Thanks for watching.
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