Of course. We all do, right? As modern filmmakers we LOVE the convenience and cost of digital cinema cameras and all that goes with that. No expensive film. No problems when the 1st AC lets a reel unwind in the tent. We can watch a take instantly instead of waiting for dailies…the list is endless.
But, there’s a downside to digital. At least a perceived downside: It doesn’t look like film! You can shoot 24 frames with a 1/48 shutter. But we cannot obtain the gorgeous personality traits of film with a digital sensor. And this is the problem Dehancer was designed to address.
Check out a before and after shot from my latest film below. This was shot on a Blackmagic Design Pocket 4K with a Sirui anamorphic lens. It was 4K DCI Blackmagic RAW.
A big difference right? The lower image looks much more cinematic. So what is Dehancer doing exactly? First, analog film has many characteristics. How it handles light. How exposure changes more than just details in brights and shadows. How the development process affects the look. How the optical printing process also affects the look.
And so much more.
Dehancer emulates the entire film process in a very technical way. This means some tools might appear redundant as we go through them, but they’re not. Take contrast for example: There are many ways contrast can be tweaked with actual film. So the Dehancer tools accurately reproduce these steps and make them available to us.
The people behind Dehancer have their own lab. They do their own development. They've studied and countless numbers of actual film stocks. They have also researched cognitive stuff like how the human eye sees color. They've developed their own mathematical models because they couldn't find models accurate enough for their purposes. Dehancer is a very accurate film emulation tool. We're not just dumping on grain or bloom FX. It's way beyond that.In this article we’re gonna walk through Dehancer in detail. I’m gonna give you examples from my latest film RECKONING. So with all of that said, let’s dive in:
Dehancer provides a free trial option that you can test out. Visit their website. Select “Products” from the main menu. Look for “Dehancer Pro” and download. Choose the free trial option. Once the download completes, you should have a zip file.
Close DaVinci Resolve (if open). Double-click on the zip file, open the folder. Double-click on the application file. Continue > Accept License > Continue > Install. And we’re done. Now let’s open up Resolve and go to Preferences > System > Video Plugins. Make sure Dehancer is checked.
For the next steps you want to have a timeline open with footage. Jump over to the COLOR PAGE in Resolve. Dehancer works kind of like a LUT—if you’ve ever used a LUT before. You place Dehancer at the END of your clip node tree—remember, the video signal moves from left to right.
Here’s how to add Dehancer to a clip:
The first thing we need to do is scroll down to Options in the Dehancer settings area on the right of the Color Page. Set quality to high. Next click Disable All Tools. When you add Dehancer to a serial node, it enables some things by default, which is never the look you want, so just disable it.
If you purchased Dehancer click License Info, paste in your license key and activate the plugin. With it activated, click Check Profiles. This will download the latest updates from Dehancer.Scroll back to the top of Dehancer options. Now we’re ready to step through the settings. It might seem daunting, but once you used to them you will love this software!
Here we tell Dehancer what type of timeline we’re working in. Set the source to the same as your timeline. I’m in a DaVinci Wide Gamut, color managed project. If I go to my project settings > color management it will show a DWG timeline. So my choice would be DVR WG/Intermediate.
But what if you're exporting and/or monitoring in Rec.709? DaVinci Resolve is gracefully taking everything down to a Rec.709 output from DWG. Dehancer is happening before that. The input and output for Dehancer is what your Resolve timeline is set to.Under Input we have: Exposure, Temperature, Tint and Defringe. I rarely use these tools. I always adjust color, exposure and tint in native Resolve via the Camera RAW tab (at a meta data level with BRAW footage) or with the Resolve HDR palette.
Defringe has to do with chromatic aberrations. Some tools in Dehancer might react negatively with chromatic aberrations in your footage and this allows for correcting such. Notice Defringe has an on and off checkbox—this tool (and others) must be enabled for your changes to take affect. This is handy as you can simply turn and entire tool on and off to see easily the affect on picture.
What are chromatic aberrations? When light enters a lens, the light waves are bent and can hit the sensor slightly different causing a "rainbow" fringe on parts of the image. Some lenses won't do this like others. So in a nutshell, chromatic aberration gives a rainbow look to edges.Something to know about the tools under Input: These are processed before other tools in Dehancer. For example, if I go down to Print, there’s an exposure setting there as well. But the Input exposure happens earlier in the pipeline than the Print exposure. Make sense? There’s something else about the Input tools, but we’ll get to that later. Let’s cut to:
The Film area allows us to choose a negative film stock. Now you might be thinking, “How am I applying negative film stock to my digital footage?” How does that even work? I wondered this too.
Here’s what’s going on. As I’ve said, Dehancer has a lab. They know how to actually develop film. They’ve done A LOT of sampling with all types of actual film stocks. And they figured out ways to bring characteristics of those film stocks to your digital footage.
I’ve tested and it works—it’s really, really cool. Nowadays there are four primary film stocks used nfrom Kodak (by people like Chris Nolan). Kodak Vision 3 50D, 250D, 200T and 500T. The T stands for tungsten and it’s for lower light. The D stands for daylight. However the full list of actual film stocks in Dehancer is huge! You’ll enjoy experimenting.
Info: Negative film is basically raw data that requires further interpretation to be seen, kind of like log footage or raw footage from a camera. A color negative is developed and then optically printed to a positive film or print film. Digital scans of the negative are also possible, but are not the same quality as an optical print.Now what’s the Push/Pull (ev) about? This is amazing. In a basic sense, it’s messing with exposure. But if you know anything about film, when you change exposure, it doesn’t just affect shadows and highlights. It also affects color. Dehancer has tested exposure on their film stocks to get accurate push/pull data. These settings change based on the color negative you choose! So I can go two stops above or two stops below, and it will change the color as well as the exposure.
I think even Chris Nolan would be impressed.
Next we jump down to expand. Why? Dehancer recommends momentarily skipping Film Developer and Film Compression when using a negative film stock. We need to tweak Expand first before checking out the other settings. So what’s Expand about?
All film stocks have different contrasts. They have different black and white points. Dehancer is really keyed in on accuracy, so they avoid any digital corrections on their end. This means sometimes when we apply a color negative film stock (or whatever negative film stock), we might lose contrast. And so they allow us to tweak this here. They refuse to do it on their end as their goal is to be as accurate as possible. I can enable Expand and if I take black down, it’s gonna lower contrast. If I take it up, it’s gonna raise it. We can also adjust our white point, etc.
Tip: Even though Dehancer says to use Expand next after Film, don't spend too much time tweaking because there are other tools that affect contrast and exposure that we'll get to. You must get familiar with everything before you spend a ton of time dialing something in with a single tool. And then it's all about experimentation.When developing film—which I haven’t done—you can radically change the look based on the development process alone. An experienced lab technician can use certain chemical combinations and make miracles happen. They could take the same scene shot with the same color negative film stock and make it look radically different based on what they do with development.
Dehancer has added the Film Developer toolset, which allows us to play lab tech. We can come in here and say, okay, I’m gonna make my own creative concoction for this shot, and that’s what this is all about. So I can enable it, and then the first thing is contrast boost. Next, we have Gamma Correction which allows us to change how much the mid-tones are shifted towards shadows or highlights.
Color Separation and Color Boost deal with saturation. Color separation relates to color filters in the emulsion layers of film. The emulsion layer is like a layer of gelatin with suspended crystals that react to light. Color separation defaults to 100. If you drop that back, it removes saturation from the most intense colors first. Color boost affects everything more simultaneously.
Info: As mentioned up top, Dehancer tools are not redundant. Dehancer has created tools that match certain aspects or steps of the analog film development process—even the optical scan process and printing to positive film. Their goal is to emulate the entire film development chain as so any creative applications exist. Our job is to become familiar and choose the best tools for the job. For example: If you wanted to change contrast on your image you could do that with Resolve HDR tools, the Resolve Primaries or several places within Dehancer!If you overexpose when you’re shooting on film, you don’t lose details in your highlights as fast as you do with a digital sensor. And to be clear, the Film Compression tool is not going to help you recover stuff that you’ve clipped due to bad exposure with a digital sensor. But it may allow recovery on shots where it’s not actually lost to data. What the tool is doing is bringing down or “compressing” extremes back towards the mid-tones. And we can tweak aspects of how and where the compression happens.
Under Film we chose a color negative which applied characteristics of that stock to our digital footage, right? Is this making sense? Now with the Print tools we can apply the characteristics of a print film to our footage. Remember, in the “real” world of film we have a negative the stores the image, and a positive or “print” film which is designed for viewing.
The most accurate way to go from a color negative to print film is via optical printing. And this is what Dehancer emulates. For example, with Chris Nolan films they primarily use optical printing vs digital scanning.Dehancer provides two print film stock choices: Fujifilm 3513 and the classic Kodak 2383. The image below uses the Kodak Vision 3 50D color negative with the Kodak 2383 print film.
You will see massive changes to your footage my just selecting a Kodak Vision 3 color negative and the Kodak 2383 print film. Those two changes alone are huge. The Print tool allows for further tweaking of your image based on things they can do in the actual optical printing process: Target White, Exposure, Tonal Contrast, Color Density and Saturation.
This allows you to tweak color temp—as we’ve already been able to do, right? So let’s talk practical: how could this benefit you? Imagine under Film you choose a color negative and adjust Push/Pull to one stop under which changes the color slightly. Next you choose the Kodak 2383 print film and with Target White you lean the color in the same direction. This will yield a different look vs using a single tool alone. As is true with actual film! Make sense?
Exposure is pretty straight forward. When performing an optical print, exposure can be tweaked. Dehancer actually recommends starting with tonal contrast because exposure affects the way they work together. If you want to change anything with contrast in the Print tool, begin with tonal contrast and then tweak exposure.
This contrast tool uses a very sophisticated nonlinear compression. However, still keep an eye on your scopes whenever messing with contrast in any shape or form. If you do get anything too hot like blown out clouds or something, you can always return to Film Compression.
These both deal with saturation and may sound very familiar to Color Separation and Color Boost under Film Developer. However, Color Density provides perceptual saturation. It’s not a one-to-one linear mode correction. Which means it will affect significant colors in a higher degree. Saturation itself is more of a traditional saturation control, but here you can only reduce it, you can’t add to it.
Next we have…
This tool simulates changing the color of light used for print exposure with positive film (the film you print to). Color Head allows us to tweak a light by a little bit from like 5500 to 6500 Kelvin. We can change these individually or we can gang them. You can also get specific as to where color changes happen. Why? Analog film isn’t just like a digital file—you don’t just pump a hue into the whole file. So we can move more of our change into the shadows, mid tones, etc. Crazy amounts of control all mapped back to the analog film process!
This option is super nice. When set to 100 it preserves whatever exposure you already have. So if you’ve got skin tone dialed in, any changes performed with the Color Head tool will not affect exposure. I’ve tested and it is superb. Impact is like an overall opacity for the Color Head tool. Drag it down and the intensity of all changes are reduced. Very handy!
Tip: Remember when I said there's more regarding Input that we'd get to later? Here it is: Dehancer recommends using Color Head vs messing with anything under Input. So if you didn't have camera raw footage and you couldn't go to the camera raw tab or you didn't want to use the HDR tools but you did want to change color temperature, Dehancer says do it here vs Input.
Real film grain isn’t just overlaid on the top of the image. The image itself entirely consists of the grain. In the light of real emulation, Dehancer reconstructs a shot to give it a more analog feel. You have options for different types of film. 8mm will have more grain than 65mm. And each of these has different ISO settings. So a lower ISO will have less grain. The image above uses 65mm ISO 500 film grain. The footage is from a Pocket 4K.
We can also use the Amount slider to control how much grain is applied. And if you choose a film profile and choose custom, it will bring over all the individual settings that make up the profile and you can configure from there. VERY COOL. This includes the size, amount and resolution. You can specify how much in the shadows vs the mid tones vs the highlights. AMAZING.
Chroma has to do with the film emulsion layer. The Film Type affects the grain amount (positive has less grain than negative). And for Mode, analog is always your best look. If you need to kick something out fast for review, you can choose noise. But you want to do analog for your final product. This is a very sophisticated film grain tool, in theme with everything else Dehancer does.
So what is halation? Halation is a film emulsion effect that can give a red/orange glow or halo around bright light sources and distinct contrast areas in your image. Now the big warning with the Halation tool is that it can affect skin tone. I typically do not use this tool because of that. If you do want the throwback look of halation on your footage, start here before dialing in your skin tone.
Tip: Scroll down to output and you'll discover a Total Impact setting. This takes all the changes you did in Dehancer on a particular serial node and performs a global adjustment. Sort of like the "opacity" of the Dehancer effect.
Bloom is a gorgeous tool. You used to get bloom with old vintage lenses, stuff like that. With modern cameras and lenses, you can purchase filters like the Black Pro Mist from Tiffin. Screw them onto your lens and get a glow while shooting. The problem? You’re baking that into the image. And from my personal experience, Black Pro Mist filters can do funky stuff with anamorphic lenses. I’d much rather use this tool in Dehancer. It’s applies to the above image and adds a beautiful glow to the officer’s metal badge, the coffee cup and more.
Tip: Some Dehancer tools (like Bloom) have a mask mode which allows you to see exactly what areas of the image the tool is affecting. Very handy when tweaking profiles beyond defaults.Similar to the Film Grain tool, you can further configure a bunch of detailed settings for Bloom.
Another retro throwback item is film damage. Dust, hair, scratches and other items inevitably show up on a movie shot with film. The Film Damage tool allows you to add this vintage feel to your digital footage. You can choose a profile, set the total amount and jump out to custom for more fine control.
Film breath has to do with issues where exposure changes from frame to frame. Gate weave has to do with the film itself physically moving. These are old school problems that nobody wants. These tools are for very specific purposes—a 1912 class reunion video maybe? But you get it.
Overscan happens when they purposely scan outside the image and pick up film perfs. You can change it to match different film stocks. Vignetting is considered a flaw with the lens. It’s not what you want when you’re shooting a movie, but we’ve seen it before, and now it’s kind of a creative tool at times.
Tip: If you will use a vignette, do it on the early end because it will mess with your exposure, your contrast, stuff like that. And remember the mask mode will show you exactly what's going on.Dehancer has an implementation of False Colors under Monitor. Could be kind of handy if you don’t have another tool you like. Personally I’m good with my scopes. The Clipping Indicator is also located here if you need that for any reason.
We discussed this above, but this allows you to adjust the strength of all the Dehancer tools combined.
I’ve not used this and won’t try to speak to it. But obviously it looks like a way to create a LUT based off changes and export that for use. Which is VERY handy for monitoring on set.
When introduced to Dehancer I was 90% through grading my current film with native Resolve tools (which are amazing). But after witnessing the beauty that Dehancer could bring to my digital footage, I started the grade over from Scene 1.
Dehancer is incredible. I know it costs money, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s not that much. You nuke more on craft services for the average short film. I can definitely say Dehancer TRANSFORMED the look of my current film!
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