AN alternative to Dehancer for Photographers, Filmmakers and Cinematographers

Traditional LUT Based Film Emulation

What Dehancer does well.

First, let's start with what Dehancer does really well. Dehancer is a plugin for various editing applications, including Adobe Premiere and Davinci Resolve, that aims to emulate the color and structure characteristics of analog film by offering a range of presets for different film stocks. With Dehancer, you can quickly and easily recreate the look of particular film stocks without the need for extensive technical knowledge. Dehancer actually does a pretty good job with these emulations, something that many other products completely fail at. Here's a shot with a Dehancer film preset applied. Not too shabby indeed:

However, while Dehancer offers a range of looks and a few control parameters, it can be limiting in its flexibility. With a limited number of film stocks to choose from, it can be challenging to achieve a truly unique look that fits your specific creative vision. That's not a flaw of the product in any way, it's just a consequence of the static nature of these types of film emulations:

The way these emulations are made is by taking sample measurements of a large number of colors from both digital and film sources and then computing static mapping tables, ie 3D LUTs, that translate one color response to the other. We know this because long before Dehancer arrived on the scene, we created the hugely popular VisionColor film emulation libraries, which, like Dehancer, did a pretty good job of accurately emulating 35mm negative film. Today of course there are  hundreds of influencers and dubious 'companies' selling film emulation LUTs and presets and everybody seems to have their own idea of what film looks like. Which begs the question:

Why do we like film and how can we do better?

A more flexible approach to film color emulation.

Most people don't actually have a frame of reference when it comes to film beyond the recognition that if, for example, the latest Star Wars was shot on Vision3 500T 5219, that film stock must look pretty great. There's really no arguing with that, of course, but when it comes to digital emulations of these stocks, we're usually not looking for LUTs or plugins that help us match digital to film for intercutting footage. Most of us use film emulations because they make our footage look nice. Plain and simple. Whether the label on the file or preset actually matches the film stock it claims to match is shockingly irrelevant if it envelopes our images in that mighty film look. So what is it that makes film look like film, or rather, what is it that makes film emulations give images such a distinct and undeniably popular look? Well, here's one idea: Smoothness and complexity.

Film emulations, when done well, exhibit color and structure characteristics that have a much higher degree of stable color transform complexity than what can be easily achieved with the linear input controls in most interface driven software. But that's a shortcoming of the mathematical models embedded into color processing engines, not a unique characteristic of film. It's just that film has the advantage of being a physical medium that can leverage the naturally occurring framework of chemistry to do it's magic, something that digital systems just don't get for free.

And this is where Color.io comes in. Color.io is not software that emulates film stocks by statically mapping digital colors to their film representation like Dehancer, FilmConvert or VisionColor.

Color.io simulates the underlying chemistry of film and its interaction with light. You can use Color.io to emulate film stocks and produce physically accurate and natural-looking film-like colors. But you're not locked into a specific film look. What you get is a streamlined and simple to use interface into a color engine that models the complex non-linearities of film while ensuring very high color stability and smoothness under the hood. The result is better looking images with deep, painterly colors - completely shaped to your unique taste and vision. And whether you want to use it to emulate any specific film stock or do something else entirely is completely up to you. Just as it should be.