Every frame runs through one scene-referred chain. The viewer applies it as a 65-point tetrahedral LUT on the GPU, baked from the same code that renders the exports and writes the .cube, so what you see is what you deliver.
Decode. Display images are read through the transfer of your Output, the way the timeline shows them, then unrendered to scene light; a channel near the top of the display is unrendered no further than the color's own brightness implies, so a clipped orange reaches the grade as a bright orange, not as an extreme red. Camera log is decoded with its own curve and kept in its wide gamut: only colors beyond Rec.2020 are compressed, smoothly.
Looks. Each press composes ten grades for your frame: first the frame at its best, then one from each family of looks before any family repeats (sixteen archetypes in thirteen families, from vivid and split-toned to faded, cool, night and bleached). Each look is named after a hummingbird that carries its color, then two digits, its key and its contrast: Sylph 5:8 has teal shadows, normal brightness and punchy contrast. The bird comes from the hue of the shadow tint, or of the highlight tint where the shadows stay neutral (Jacobin and Hermit are the neutral looks, punchy and soft), and a color always gets the same bird. The first digit counts thirds of a stop and the second steps of about 6.5% contrast, both 5 when normal, so 5:5 is neutral; where two looks in a batch would share a name, a third digit gives their saturation. The name follows the look as you refine it, and a saved look keeps the name it was saved with. Point at the name above Amount, or click it, and it says what it means: the bird's color, what each digit is now, the saturation, and the shadow and highlight tints as angles on the vectorscope (neutral where there is none). A family is a direction, not a preset: its targets are measured on your frame and solved for it. Black and white are set relative to the frame's own levels, so nothing is crushed or clipped that was not already, shadow detail is kept, and the frame's key is held inside the family's band. The color of a look lives in its shadows, midtones and highlights as colored light, in a wide log space, so a teal shadow deepens into the blacks the way a filtered lamp would instead of turning them grey; the tint is solved to a set strength on the frame's own neutrals and spared on colorful objects and on skin. Contrast turns about the frame's key, the toe and the highlight compression are solved to the targets, saturation is set as density against the source, and skin is placed last: its hue held within healthy skin, its lightness at a set offset from where the frame had it. Every look is then judged on the frame, for clipping, gamut stress, skin, casts on the neutrals and whether it reached its signature, and the ten are picked apart from each other. Variations of a look each go one clear way: warmer, cooler, more contrast, softer, richer, quieter, another tint, a stronger split, another negative or print, a point of printer light, lighter or darker, and each is labelled with the way it went. Black, white and skin are solved again for every one.
Rendering. A look is either printed or rendered through the Colobri tone scale. The tone scale is the print's own grey scale applied per channel after an inset toward luminance, so bright saturated lights go to white through their own hue, an orange through yellow, not through pink, and it keeps the gradation of the brightest colors the display can show.
Negative. The stocks are modelled from published characteristic data: each layer's spectral sensitivity, the characteristic curves measured from the stock's own 18% grey exposure, and the spectral dye densities. Every scene color is given the smoothest natural reflectance spectrum that has it, inside Rec.709 and beyond it, so a red exposes the film the way a red object does, not through three fixed primaries; the light passes a lens that cuts the near UV and exposes the three layers. The curves, DIR interimage effects and each dye's density as an additive printer sees it produce printing densities. The black-and-white stock is printed in black and white, and its push and pull follow its published development series.
Print. Printer lights expose a print film whose dyes, curves, lamp and interlayer effects were fitted to print references. Its dyes are integrated over 36 wavelengths per pixel, then projected and adapted to D65. Every print is timed to grey at every level, the way a colorist times a print before choosing any warmth or coolness on purpose, and the hues the dyes would pull away (greens toward cyan, yellows toward orange, bright saturated lights toward white) are mostly put back, so the film adds its tone and character without casting the frame. The print curve sets how much of the print's own tone scale the image takes.
Output. Colors the display cannot show are compressed in OKLCh at constant lightness and hue, keeping their gradation out to the Rec.2020 boundary, then encoded for your Output: Rec.709 Gamma 2.4, Rec.709-A, sRGB or Display P3. The viewer shows the light that timeline would show; scopes read its code values.
Saved looks keep a look with its Refine for any project, with a picture of the shot it was saved on so you know it again: on another frame a saved look is fitted to it (its color stays; exposure, black, white and skin are solved for the new frame), or used exactly as saved. Exported LUTs bake the entire grade, including the source decode, so they drop onto your clip in DaVinci Resolve or Premiere Pro. Inside Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve, the Colobri plugin reads the frame under your playhead and applies the grade to your timeline. Everything runs on your machine; your footage never leaves it.
Shortcuts: G generate, F grab the playhead frame (in a plugin), Enter apply to the timeline (in a plugin), A add as layer, S save the look, ←→ browse looks, V variations, B grade on or off, C split compare, E export, O open, Space play. Click the image to switch the grade off and on; hold it to peek at the source.