The way we’re building film profiles for Dehancer differs significantly from typical approaches, which are basically used in the film and photo industries. In this article we’ll discuss our profile building technique and how it differs from other applications and plugins.

This article is big, so to get straight to the business, we offer a brief summary:

Dehancer film profiles key features:

– over 45 next generation quality film profiles (the list is constantly updated)
– full range of current Kodak Vision 3 negative movie films
– all profiles are built around sampling the real analogue media, combined with non-linear image processing
– film targets are printed optically from negatives to print media to ensure that they are correctly interpreted in terms of color and contrast
– there are 3 target samples made for each film: underexposed –2 Ev, normal exposure and overexposed +2 Ev. So in fact each multi-LUT consists of 3 separate LUT-profiles, smoothly adjustable between the extreme values
– not only films are sampled but many other analogue photographic processes as well – like Ambrotype, Prokudin-Gorsky color separation technique etc.
– basic set of conversion profiles for movie cameras, including Arri Alexa
– Exposure, Contrast and Analogue Range Limiter tools are based upon the real optically printed media samples, so these tools do behave like real analogue media does
– brand new Color Density tool emulates analogue media saturation
– unique Expand tool meant to control black and white points independently
– False Color mode added for visual grading quality control
– all film profiles are updated in one click within the plugin

Below is a detailed description of the basic principles of film profile sampling technique used by Dehancer team.

Continue reading “How we build film profiles” →