Getting the Bleach Bypass Look in DaVinci Resolve
The bleach bypass effect is basically a look you get when you develop film without removing the silver halide. In DaVinci Resolve, this maps pretty cleanly onto a colorist workflow using the Colorista nodes you already have on the node graph. I have built dozens of these over the years, and the trick is understanding how to chain your nodes rather than just cranking saturation up and slapping a LUT on top of the timeline. Before I get into the specific instructions, you need to know what a Colorista node actually does. The Colorista is a color correction platform inside Resolve that lets you manage gains, lifts, gamma, saturation, and contrast across three separate channels. When we talk about Colorista Bleach Instructions, we are really talking about a specific node arrangement that simulates that desaturated, high-contrast, low-color look. It is not one button you press. You build it. Here is what that actually means in practice. Start with a Serial node. Put your Colorista in that node. You want to drop your midtones and lift your blacks slightly, while pulling back saturation by roughly forty to fifty percent. Then add a second Colorista node right after it and push your highlights up. The result should feel like a photograph that was overexposed in the darkroom and then chemically stripped. Most people stop at that point and call it done, but it looks wrong. The skin tones turn orange and the shadows get muddy because you did not account for the color matrix shift that happens with bleach bypass.
The Actual Workflow
I will walk through my standard setup from scratch. Open your project and go to the Color page. Add a new Serial node above your existing correction nodes. Double-click it and choose Colorista from the node options. If you are on Resolve 17 or 18, it shows up in the node browser under the Correction section. Now apply these settings to your first Colorista node. Set the Lift to about 0.45 on the RGB channels. Set the Gamma to 0.72. Set the Gain to 1.15. Drop the Saturation knob to roughly 0.55. Leave the Contrast at neutral. Now add a second Colorista node below the first one in your Serial chain. On this node, set Lift to 0.60. Set Gamma to 1.0. Set Gain to 1.35. Pull Saturation down to 0.40. Increase the Contrast to about 1.4. At this point the image should look desaturated and contrasty, which is the core of the look. But there is a problem. The image probably looks flat in the blues and greens because you have not adjusted the individual color channels. Add a third node, a third Colorista node, and set the individual R, G, and B channel gains. Push Red Gain to 1.2. Pull Blue Gain to 0.75. Keep Green Gain at 1.0. This shifts the entire color balance toward the warm side, which is exactly what real bleach bypass film looks like. The silver remaining in the emulsion reflects more red and green light than blue light. That is the physics behind it. You are mimicking the spectral response of a physical chemical process.
A Real Problem I Ran Into
There is one thing that always goes wrong with this setup, and it took me about six months to figure out what was happening. I was working on a wedding film a few years ago where the bride wore a white dress and the groom wore a dark charcoal suit. When I applied the bleach bypass nodes, the dress turned gray and the suit turned almost black with zero detail. The highlights clipped out completely because the Gain values were too aggressive for high-key subjects. The workaround was simple but not obvious if you are just following a preset. I added a fourth node after the three Colorista nodes, this time a Custom Node with a Power Window. I drew a soft circular window around the bride's dress and used a qualifier to isolate the white areas. I then created a mask and used a second instance of the same node with the mask inverted so only the skin tones and midtones received the full bleach bypass treatment. The whites got a much gentler version of the effect, with the saturation only dropped to 0.85 instead of 0.40 and the Gain bumped to only 1.08 instead of 1.35. This preserved the dress detail while still giving the rest of the frame that harsh, stripped look. It added maybe ten minutes to the grade but saved the shot entirely.
Get the Full Details
Why Beginners Mess This Up
Most people skip the individual channel adjustment on the third node. They rely on the overall Saturation knob alone, which just makes everything equally dull instead of selectively removing color the way bleach bypass actually does. The result looks like a bad preset you download from the internet, not a real film emulation. Another common mistake is leaving the Color Match or Temp/Tint controls untouched on the first node. The bleach bypass look is inherently warm, so if your source footage is slightly cool or fluorescent, you need to pre-adjust the temperature before applying the effect or the final image will look muddy rather than clean and punchy. Also, the Contrast multiplier on the second node is too high for many log sources. If you are shooting in DaVinci Wide Gamut or LogC, those extra contrast points will crush your shadows into pure black very quickly. In those cases, dial the Contrast back down to 1.2 on the second node and rely more on the Lift and Gain shifts to get the contrast you need. It is a tradeoff between preserving shadow detail and getting the signature bleach bypass contrast curve.
Downloadable Preset Info
If you want the exact node values I listed above in a format you can import directly, they are available on the Blackmagic Design forum under the Colorista preset section. Search for "bleach bypass custom node setup" and you will find a .drx file that contains the three-node configuration with the channel shifts baked in. You can drag and drop it onto your node graph and it will appear as a grouped node you can modify. I use this preset as my starting point for every project that needs this look. It saves me the fifteen minutes of dialing in the numbers each time, though I always adjust the third node's channel gains individually based on the source footage. No two clips are identical. This method does not work well with footage that has heavy noise in the shadows. The bleach bypass effect amplifies contrast and pushes midtones down, which means any noise in the darker areas becomes much more visible. If your source footage is noisy, the resulting grade will look worse than the original. In those situations, run a noise reduction pass first, preferably in the Color page rather than the Fairlight page, before applying the Colorista bleach bypass nodes. Alternatively, consider using a different approach entirely, like a custom LUT built from actual Kodak 5219 film scans, which tends to preserve shadow texture better than the node-based method I described here. The node approach also struggles with skin tones that are already quite warm. If your subject has redness or rosacea, the R channel boost on the third node will make it significantly worse. I usually add a small HSL qualifier on a separate node to isolate the red-orange range and pull the saturation down only in that band before applying the main bleach bypass stack. It is an extra step, but it prevents the face from looking like a sunburn.
That is how I handle Colorista Bleach Instructions on every job. The setup is straightforward once you understand what each node is doing, and the channel-level adjustments are what separate a convincing emulation from something that just looks filtered.
