Latent — Look development for DaVinci Resolve. Real film, modeled photon to print.
In film, the latent image is the one already captured in the emulsion, unseen until development draws it out.
Real film, modeled photon to print.
Latent is a look development plugin for DaVinci Resolve. It doesn't imitate the look of film. It runs your image through the process that made that look — live, on every pixel, while you grade.
Coming soon
$149$319at v1.0
Free to join, no credit card required. Checkout and the watermarked trial both open at launch.
Latent's Default look as the output transform. No grade underneath.
Out of the box
Same frame, different rendering
Both sides start from identical camera log. On the left, a standard color space transform to Rec.709. On the right, Latent in the same slot, at its defaults. No grade on either side.
After
BeforeWatch the red bodywork keep its gradation, and the overcast sky roll off with shape instead of clipping.
Developed, not applied
Film never had a look. It had a process. Light exposed a negative, a lab developed it, a timer printed it, and a projector pushed light through the result. Everything we call filmic was a consequence of that chain. Latent rebuilds the chain itself: every pixel becomes a spectrum of light, lands on a color negative, develops, prints, and projects — live, while you grade.
The name is from the darkroom. A latent image is the one exposed film already carries, invisible until development brings it out. That's how Latent treats your footage: the image is there. The process develops it.
01·Your color
One pixel of the working-space image
02·Spectrum
Rebuilt into a physical spectrum of light
03·The negative
Exposed layer by layer, then developed
04·The print
Printed onto release stock under timed lights
05·Projection
Lamp to screen — the image you deliver
Emergent behavior
Nothing drawn by hand
Every behavior below is a property of film that people shoot film for. None of them are drawn in. They fall out of the process, as they always did.
Density
Color with weight
Saturated color on film is dense color. More exposure builds more dye, and more dye reads as depth: reds that sit heavy in the frame, yellows that turn amber, neon that keeps its edges. Digital saturation gets louder. Film gets richer.
Latent has no density slider because film had none. Density is what exposure, development, and the print do to a color, and Latent models all three. Give a color more light and it gains weight, not glare.
After
BeforeThe neon holds its lettering and the costume reds land deep instead of glowing. Nothing was darkened — the color is denser, not dimmer.
After
BeforeThe yellows gain density as they brighten: amber, not glare.
After
BeforeThe field deepens to amber and the whites of the vest go cream.
Tonal range
A shoulder, not a ceiling
Exposure is set in stops on the negative, and the negative answers like film. Highlights slow down as they climb, shed saturation on the way, and settle into a clean white. Shadows fall to the print's own black — the deepest thing its dyes can make, not a level anyone chose.
Between those ends, tone keeps moving. The same surface reads slightly different at every stop, hue drifting gently with it, which is much of why film feels alive. Nothing clips, because nothing in the chain has a hard edge to hit.
After
BeforeThe white helmet and the cloud bank hold their shape all the way up and land on white — not on a wall.
Skin
Skin stays human
A physical medium can't render an implausible face. Dyes only build what the chemistry can reach, so on film, skin lands somewhere natural at every exposure — pale or deep, flushed or shadowed, lit by neon or by a window.
Latent inherits that constraint instead of fighting for it. There is no skin detection and no protected zone. Faces come out right for the same reason everything else does: they can't go anywhere film couldn't take them.
After
BeforeTwo complexions and a chart in one frame of mixed light. Both read natural, and the chart keeps the rendering honest.
After
BeforeHigh key without wax: warmth in the face while the near-whites stay clean.
Grain
In the image, not on it
Latent's grain is developed into the negative's density and then printed, which is the only way grain ever reached a screen. So it behaves: strongest in the midtones, fine in the highlights, near monochrome in the deepest shadows, where the print's own grain takes over.
Amplitude follows each stock's published granularity — 500T is coarser than 50D because it really was. Gauge is a choice of 8, 16, 35, or 65 mm. Push the development and it coarsens. And a faster, grainier setup resolves a touch softer, because grain and sharpness were never separate decisions on film.
Halation
Borrowed light
Halation is highlight light that pierced the emulsion, bounced off the base, and exposed the red layer on the way back out. Latent scatters it before the curves ever see it, and pays for the glow with energy taken from the highlight itself, so it reads as exposure rather than a bloom laid over the frame. You set the amount, the reach, and the warmth. The physics sets everything else.
Silver retention
Bleach bypass is one decision
Skip the bleach in the lab and the silver stays in the emulsion beside the dye. Blacks crush, contrast climbs, color drains — all at once, because all three have a single cause: retained silver is neutral density over the image.
Latent hands you the cause, not three sliders chasing the effect. Decide how much silver stays and where. Kept on the print, it takes the shadows. Kept on the negative, it takes the highlights. The look follows.
Look development
Every decision the lab had
A film look was four decisions: which stock, how to develop it, what to print it on, and how to time the print. Those are Latent's controls. Set them, save the recipe as a look, load it on the next job, or hand it to set as a LUT.
The negative
Six stocks, not sixty
Kodak Vision3 50D, 250D, 200T, and 500T. Kodak 5247 II, the 1974 stock, for when the seventies are the brief. Double-X 5222 for true black and white. Each is characterized layer by layer from the manufacturer's published data, and each keeps its personality: 50D the finest-grained and most saturated, 500T soft in the toe with generous shadow latitude, 5247 II punchy in the reds and twice as grainy. The catalog is short on purpose — a few emulsions modeled to the bottom beat a long menu of approximations.
The lab
Time in the bath
Push or pull up to three stops and everything a longer development did arrives together: contrast climbs, grain coarsens, highlights warm while shadows cool. One cause, four effects, exactly as the chemistry had it. Interlayer sets the strength of the DIR couplers, which buy saturation and edge sharpness from the same reaction. Shadow flash pre-exposes the negative to lift its shadows into a soft veil. And the negative keeps a bleach bypass of its own, separate from the print's.
The print
Four prints and a timer
Kodak 2383, the print of the last twenty-five years. Premier 2393, punchier, with deeper blacks. EXR 5386, the mid-nineties print, softer in the blacks and warmer in the highlights. Fuji Eterna-CP 3513DI, cooler, unmistakably Fuji. Balance rides on red, green, and blue printer lights in twelfth-stop points, the convention every lab timer used, and they respond like the real thing because they land where the real ones did — on the print stock's own curves. Crossover tilts the print's layer contrasts around a pivot you choose. Fade ages the dyes at their true, unequal rates, from modern warm drift to Eastmancolor pink.
Black and white
Silver, not desaturation
Choose Double-X and Latent switches pipelines, not palettes: one panchromatic layer, a silver curve in place of three dye curves, the stock's own grain. Skies print light and red lipstick prints dark, because that's how silver reads the world. Toning is the real chemistry — sepia, selenium, gold, and iron blue each convert the silver shadows-first, leaving the brightest whites clean. Image tone tilts the silver itself from warm to cold; on film that was literally the size of the grain, and here it still is.
Looks
Nine recipes, ready to break open
Latent ships with nine looks: Default, Plum, Toffee, Black Cherry, Brioche, Ice, Mocha, Squid Ink, and Black Liquorice. Each is a saved recipe of the controls above — a stock, a development, a print, a timing — so any of them can be pulled apart and made yours. Looks save as small .latent files that travel between projects and suites, and any look exports as a 17, 33, or 65 point LUT for set.
It fits the pipeline you have
- Grade in DaVinci Wide Gamut / Intermediate, ACEScct, or ARRI LogC4 — Latent decodes each with the published math.
- It sits on the last node and renders to the display, taking the place of your output transform.
- Output in Rec.709 gamma 2.4 or 2.2, or sRGB.
- Texture-only mode lays Latent's grain and halation over any other rendering you already use.
Rigor
Built to be trusted on paying work
Neutral means neutral
Mid grey lands on the same display value for every stock, so switching stocks never shifts your exposure or balance. Bypass the node and your image comes back bit-identical. There is no baked-in look you can't turn off.
One model, tested against itself
The same core compiles three ways — GPU, CPU, and a reference build — and an automated suite diffs them numerically. The math you grade with is the math that was checked.
I grade with it every day
Latent is on every project I deliver. It had to earn its place on my own work before I would ask for a place on yours.
What it doesn't do yet
- macOS on Apple Silicon only. No Windows or Intel build today.
- SDR delivery only. No HDR output yet.
- A young build. In daily use on real work, but early.
Where it's headed
- More film stocks, modeled to the same depth.
- HDR output.
- Broader platform support.
Directions, not dated promises.
Fine print
For the people who check: Latent computes a genuine spectral integral, but on spectra reconstructed from your RGB — a render can't recover the scene's true spectrum. The film characterizations are anchored to the manufacturers' published data, not measured from stock I processed myself. Everything downstream of the data is physics.
Try before you buy
The trial is the whole plugin
At launch you can download Latent free. Every stock, every control, no time limit. The differences: a watermark across the frame, and LUT export stays locked.
Grade real work with it. Live with it for a week. If it earns a seat in your suite, buy a license and the watermark comes off — nothing to reinstall, and your grades carry over.
Founders Edition
$149$319at v1.0
Coming soon
Join the founders waitlist — freeFounders pricing ends when v1.0 ships.
- The full plugin for DaVinci Resolve Studio.
- A perpetual license. Pay once, own it outright.
- The v1.0 release, free when it ships.
- Every update through v1 included. v2.0 will be a paid upgrade.
DaVinci Resolve Studio · Apple Silicon Mac · macOS · SDR delivery
- Everything in Latent.
- Custom features, tailored to your studio's pipeline.
- Priority email support.
- Direct phone support.
Questions
What do I need to run Latent?
DaVinci Resolve Studio on an Apple Silicon Mac, delivering in SDR. Latent is an OFX plugin; it appears under OpenFX filters and runs on the color page.
Where does it sit in a grade?
Last. Latent renders your working-space image to the display, so it takes the place of your output transform. You grade in DaVinci Wide Gamut, ACEScct, or LogC4 underneath it, and Latent develops the result. Setup is one node and a couple of project settings; instructions come with the download.
How does the free trial work?
At launch you can download the trial build: the full plugin, every control unlocked, no time limit, with a watermark across the frame. LUT export stays locked until you license it.
What does $149 buy?
A perpetual license — pay once, own it outright. Founders get the v1.0 release free when it ships, and every update after that until v2.0, which will be a paid upgrade. At v1.0 the price rises to $319.
Does activation need the internet?
Once. Activating your license does a single online check. After that Latent runs fully offline — no phoning home, no periodic re-checks, fine on an air-gapped grading machine.
Is it fast enough to grade with?
On recent Apple Silicon, yes: with everything on, Latent renders UHD at around 65 fps on an M4 Max, and 1080p is light on any supported machine. Base fanless Macs are slower — treat 4K there as a render rather than playback.
Is there a Windows or Intel version?
Not yet. Latent is macOS on Apple Silicon today. Broader platform support is on the roadmap, without a date attached.
Does it support HDR?
Not yet. Latent renders SDR: Rec.709 at gamma 2.4 or 2.2, and sRGB. HDR output is planned.
Can I take a look on set, or to another suite?
Yes. A licensed build exports the current look as a 17, 33, or 65 point .cube LUT, and looks themselves save as small .latent files you can load anywhere Latent runs.
Real film, modeled photon to print.
The Founders Edition opens at $149, and the free trial arrives the same day. Join the waitlist and you'll have both links the moment they're live.