The Authenticity Update — the biggest update since launch. Nx 3‑Strip v2 is the result of a new forensic study of eleven three-strip Technicolor features from 1938–1952 — twelve digital sources, 56,000 measured frames, native-4K references, and multispectral measurements of surviving dye-transfer film. The entire look has been recalibrated against that evidence, from color and saturation to grain, glow and optical character.

This isn’t a new “Technicolor look.” We went back to the film, measured what was actually there, and recalibrated the reconstruction against it.

More authentic color

• Warmer shadows, cleaner whites. Deep neutral shadows no longer drift slightly green — they carry the warm bias measured in every reference film — while highlight warmth is moderated so whites read warm without a yellow veil.
• Richer, more authentic saturation. Modern digital sources are graded far less saturated than Technicolor-era production design; default renders now land inside the films’ measured chroma range, with saturation coupled to density the way the process did it.
• Muted cyans. Cyan was rendering as the most saturated hue family — backwards versus every reference film, where cyan is the weakest dye. Now correctly the most muted.
• Dye Fidelity (new — Dye Transfer) blends the dye model from the classic clean set toward the spectrally measured Process IV dyes. The real dyes’ “impurities” are what give Technicolor its warm shadow crossover — blacks that never go cold. The default reproduces that signature; higher values darken saturated greens and blues, as the real dyes did. Whites stay lab-balanced at any setting.
• White Balance (new — Print Finishing) chooses the print’s white target, from the classic warm Technicolor white to a neutral lab-balanced white. The correction is transmission-weighted, so shadows keep their warm dye crossover at any setting. The default lands whites at the warmth the reference films actually measure.

Skin Protection New

Technicolor can produce incredibly rich color, but pushing the process digitally can make skin unnaturally hot. Skin Protection (Color Authenticity) keeps faces in the range measured across the reference films while leaving vivid reds, oranges, golds, greens and blues untouched. Costumes stay spectacular. Skin stays believable. On by default; set it to 0 to restore the full ungoverned drive.

Light Temperature rebuilt

Warming now moves naturally toward golden tungsten, while cooling produces a clean daylight blue instead of drifting toward teal. Exposure remains stable throughout the range, and the extremes are much more usable. The slider’s default position renders exactly as before.

Existing presets: the control now has roughly twice the usable range, so saved values should be re-judged — an old +0.95 is about +1.9 now.

New optical character

• Veiling Glow (new — its own section, with an Enable switch and Amount slider) — the broad, warm glow that surrounds practical lights, lamps and windows in Technicolor prints, now modeled separately from Bloom (it works with Bloom on or off). It reaches well beyond the source, but only genuinely bright light sources contribute — white walls, dresses and overcast skies no longer turn into glowing blobs. On by default at a subtle level.
• Authentic halation color. The halo around bright sources now renders the rosy magenta measured from golden-era frames, with the blue scatter skirt correctly the widest. Halation Warmth is now a flare-hue control (0 = measured rose, 1 = amber).
• Halation stays where it belongs. Scattered light only prints where the receiving record is still unexposed, so glow blooms into shadows around highlights instead of washing over skies and walls.
• Scene-referred halation fixed. On log and linear input formats the thresholds now act as scene-exposure gates, so white surfaces stay clean and only real light sources halate. Display-referred formats are unchanged.

Grain rebuilt from original Technicolor film

The grain engine was rebuilt and calibrated shot-for-shot against frame-exact 4K scans of an original dye-transfer Technicolor print. The new grain matches the measured structure of the print — soft, monochrome, gently clumped, and strongest through the mids and upper mids — rather than behaving like digital RGB noise. The default level was also brought up to the measured reference.

The Technicolor texture

• Dye Spread (Diffusion) — color now resolves more softly than luminance, reproducing the characteristic way dye-transfer color sits into the image: dye washes gently across regions while the luminance drawing stays sharp. Doubles as chroma-noise smoothing on digital sources.
• Optical Softness (Camera Optics) — models the front-end softness of the taking lens and prism system while reducing the overly crisp edge character of digital footage. Green Record Sharpening and IB Acutance defaults are gentler to match.

Workflow & fixes

• Scene-referred processing has been verified end-to-end across all 23 supported input formats, and field-validated on ARRI ALEXA 35 (LogC4/AWG4) and RED Helium 8K (Log3G10/RWG) camera originals — including Output Encoding: Same as Source round-trips for color-managed timelines.
• The installed plugin version now shows in the License section on every host.
• Gather and blur samplers now round tap positions, removing a subtle color-fringing bias and restoring the misregistration controls’ full authority.

Scene-referred highlight engine New

On log and linear input formats:

• Exposure now operates in true scene-linear light before the tonemap — pulling it down genuinely recovers specular/highlight detail instead of dimming the finished print.
• The film shoulder allocates gradation per photographic stop, and the new Highlight Range (Stops) control (4–10, default 6) chooses how many stops above mid-grey survive before paper white. Most visible from 6 upward on footage with bright content (windows, speculars, practicals); it is intentionally inert on display-referred (Rec.709 etc.) sources.

Color-managed timeline support New

• Output Encoding: Same as Source (Resolve and Adobe) re-encodes the finished look back into the input format’s gamut and transfer, so DaVinci-color-managed timelines (DaVinci Wide Gamut / Intermediate) render the look correctly with no double tonemap. Final Cut Pro conforms the plugin’s output itself, so this control is not needed (or shown) there.
• Host Working Space (Premiere/AE) declares the encoding the Adobe host delivers — set it to Linear for AE 32-bpc linearized projects.
• Wide-gamut display sources (P3, Rec.2020) now get smooth out-of-gamut compression instead of hue-skewing channel clipping.
• Fixed: the Linear DaVinci Wide Gamut (EXR) input format used an incorrect gamut matrix.

Fixes

• (Final Cut Pro / Motion) Fixed an issue where the effect could fail to load, showing a red error frame on any clip it was applied to.
• (Premiere Pro) GPU rendering: Output Encoding and Host Working Space now take effect with the Mercury GPU renderer (previously they only worked with the software renderer).
• (macOS installer) Final Cut Pro plugin registration is more reliable on first install and on reinstall.

• (DaVinci Resolve, macOS) Fixed: on some macOS versions the effect could render no change (passthrough).

• Initial release. DaVinci Resolve (OpenFX), Premiere Pro / After Effects, Final Cut Pro / Motion (FxPlug 4); macOS universal (signed + notarized) and Windows x64.