Bleach
Saturation by Luminance
£25.00
Current version
2
TYPE
Look Development
dESCRIPTION
Bleach is a luminance vs saturation tool that lets you shape the saturation of your image based on brightness levels. It’s a powerful but often overlooked adjustment that’s especially useful for creating filmic looks—where shadows tend to carry more saturation and highlights appear more bleached out, hence the name. This tool is also great for creating a form of faux-contrast; by saturating shadows and desaturating highlights, you can introduce a sense of depth and richness in the dark areas while giving the highlights a clean, airy feel—boosting perceived contrast without actually altering the luminance curve.
Bleach lets you shape saturation across the tonal range, making it easy to create richer shadows, cleaner highlights, and a film-inspired sense of depth without directly changing luminance.
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Faux Contrast
Bleach is an underrated adjustment with a powerful effect: creating a kind of faux contrast — the perception of strongly increased contrast, achieved by saturating the shadows and desaturating the highlights, without directly modifying the tonal curve.
Mid-Grey in Mind
While Bleach doesn't automatically preserve middle grey, it includes a crosshair marking its exact position based on your working transfer curve — letting you purposely maintain saturation through middle grey, or deliberately shift it for creative effect.
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Questions & Answers
What is the purpose of Bleach?
Bleach is a luminance vs saturation curve — a highly valuable and often underrated adjustment for adding shape and perceived contrast to images without directly affecting tonal contrast.
What colour space / transfer curve is Bleach designed for?
Bleach is not colour space aware and can therefore be used in any colour spaces, though results will vary based on the colour space used.
Where does Bleach fit into my node tree?
Bleach is best applied at the scene or project level to shape the overall look, while still in scene-referred space before any conversion to display-referred space. Its placement among other scene- or look-based tools is flexible and ultimately a creative choice.
