Printer lights

Printer lights are the red, green and blue timing lamps in a film printer that expose the print stock. Their intensity is set in discrete steps called printer points (a point is a small, standardized change in that channel’s exposure — classically about 0.025 in log density, over a range around 0–50). A colorist “times” a shot by calling values like “25-25-25” for neutral and nudging, say, the red light up to warm it. This is the original color-balance interface, and it survives in modern grading: Resolve’s printer-lights control, the per-channel offsets in a DCTL, and the language DPs still use (“a couple of points of green out”). Crucially, printer lights act in log density, so a point is an even, additive shift across the whole range rather than a linear gain that blows out highlights.

First used in: 3.5 · Print film emulation — construction