CineLook Eterna Bleach
Bleach-bypass-inspired finish with reduced chroma, firm blacks, cool neutral separation and dense midtone contrast.
Visual character
Reduced chroma with firm cool-toned density
Best for
- Industrial drama
- War imagery
- Cold suspense
Lighting conditions
- Mixed light
- Low-key controlled light
Color character
The CineLook Eterna Bleach transform reads as a bleach-bypass finish held in check: chroma comes down across the frame while contrast goes up, so color separates by luminance rather than hue. Most of that work sits in the curve. Shadow values sit 0.045 lower, midtones rise 0.02, and highlights rise 0.08, steepening the span between bottom and top without pinching either end. Blacks land firm, the midtone stack goes dense, and highlights stay dense instead of opening into white. Color still registers, just at lower volume: the frame reads as tonal weight first, color second. Texture reads cleanly too, because medium grain survives the chroma reduction and the dense mids hold their shape. Balance is neutral, so the transform adds no cast of its own, and it carries no channel-mixing matrix; the cool, neutral separation comes from lowered chroma and the steeper curve, not from a color matrix. Skin tone handling is neutral, though reduced chroma will quietly pull faces toward whatever surrounds them.
When to choose it
Industrial drama is the natural home: concrete, steel, coolant haze, practicals burning across a wide space. War imagery suits it too, where the point is weight rather than spectacle. Cold suspense, meaning corridors, stairwells and night exteriors, gains from firm blacks and a palette that has largely surrendered its color. Mixed light is where the transform earns its keep, since neutral balance and reduced chroma stop competing sources from turning the frame into a color argument. Low-key controlled light works equally well, letting dense midtones hold shape on the shadow side. Materials with texture, such as rust, dust, wet asphalt, wool and worn paint, take the medium grain and the dense response without going flat. Daylight romance, saturated product work and anything that needs hue to carry the story are harder fits.
Working with it in Studio
Load the transform, then work the tonal controls first. Shadows and Highlights touch the same ends the curve has already steepened, so small moves go a long way. If blacks read too firm, lift Shadows rather than pulling Contrast down; midtone separation survives better that way. Temperature and Tint are for neutralizing a mixed-light frame before reduced chroma makes a stray cast obvious. Saturation can go further down, and Vibrance is the safer trim when skin is in frame. Highlight Rolloff softens the top end where the 0.08 highlight lift meets practicals or sky. Film Grain is worth a small increase on clean digital capture. Bloom and Vignette stay in the app and do not travel in a .cube export; Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Temperature, Tint, Saturation, Vibrance and Highlight Rolloff do.
How it compares
Against CineLook Reversal 100D, the split is balance and grain: 100D is daylight-balanced with fine grain and a hard highlight response, holding crisp color, while Eterna Bleach is neutral, medium-grained and dense at the top, and strips chroma instead. CineLook Reversal Vivid shares the high contrast profile and the dense highlights and shadows, but it is built for vivid RGB separation and compact highlights with fine grain, so it keeps the color the bleach transform removes. Pick 100D when daylight color should stay crisp, Vivid when saturated separation is the point, and Eterna Bleach when the frame should lose color and gain weight.
Where it fits in a grade
Eterna Bleach is a creative look rather than a foundation, so it belongs last in the chain, after the grade is corrected and balanced. Sequence it that way: load it earlier and every later move fights the dense ends it builds instead of shaping the image. Paired with a neutral base, it carries the frame's contrast on its own, and the weight follows from there. Because the curve already steepens toward the top, upstream contrast should stay modest, and the medium grain is enough on its own, without a second texture pass. Treat it as the final statement: apply it last, render the .cube, and leave the stages beneath it fixed.
Transform parameters
The CineLook CineLook Eterna Bleach transform leaves every adjustment slider at its neutral value and carries the look in its colour transform instead. Its channel matrix keeps the 0.650 / 0.720 / 0.500 diagonal and mixes at most 0.320 of one channel into another, so hues stay close to their source while crosstalk stays controlled. The luma curve sits 0.08 above the linear ramp at three-quarter tone, which is where the shoulder starts to bend.
