Dehancer review
Table of Contents
Introduction
I have always been very keen on the ergonomics of my photographic equipment, which must completely get out of the way when photographing. This allows to fully concentrate on the image and not think about the equipment.
It might then seem like a contradiction that enjoying using the photographic tool is also a fundamental part of my photography. I have been using a Leica M rangefinder system for years for this exact reason: manual focus, a wonderful piece of equipment in hand, simplicity in use. Only me, the exposure triangle, my manual focusing skills and the scene in front of me. And the manual focusing is a skill I practiced, so it becomes second nature and gets out of the way as well. So does the exposure triangle.
What’s left? The scene in front of me, I can now concentrate on making the best image I possibly can with the tool at hand.
Ektachrome E100, Dehancer
I sold my Leicas because…well, they cost so much that the investment in two bodies alone was just silly money to keep tied up, and photography is a passion above all for me, but also a business. The Leicas make no sense until this business becomes so profitable that I can afford to buy a Leica M again without financial worries. Unfortunately Leica Ms are the only game in town for true digital rangefinder cameras.
I have transitioned to the Fujifilm system, and the simplicity is gone on one side (extensive menus, many features and functions I simply don’t need, complexities of autofocus modes and settings), but my manual dials for the exposure triangle are still there. Again, just the scene to think about (and that pesky autofocus little square that needs to hit exactly where I want). I’m happy with my Fujifilm X-T5s, I enjoy them much more than the Sony A9s I used in the past (fantastic cameras but not enjoyable to use for me). But I miss my rangefinders.
How do I get my manual focus, simple exposure triangle, optical viewfinder fix now? My thought went straight to the Pentax MX fully mechanical SLR. A wonderful piece of equipment, simplicity again in use, everything I wanted from the Leicas without the eyewatering price.
But wait: the simplicity is limited to the shooting process, nothing else! I now have to think of having several rolls of film in the bag and changing them in the field. No big deal, I can do that. But then I have to develop the film, either myself (I need the equipment and the space to do that), then scan it (that dust is a killer on the negatives, and even more equipment needed), then I still have to post-process them anyway. Simplicity? Hardly!
And what about the elephant in the room? Film prices! A roll of film is expensive nowadays, although film has had an incredible resurgence. But I shoot colour, and one of my favourite film stocks is Ektachrome. Granted, being colour slide I don’t need extra steps like a colour negative in post, but have you seen the price of one roll of Ektachrome E100? If lucky I can find it here in UK for £20, but on average it will be anywhere between £27-29.50 for a single, 36 exposure 35mm roll!
Lastly, there is the matter of stocking and archiving the negatives on top of the digital scans, meaning two archives and space again.
Simplicity? Not at all: a lot of complications, actually. Complications we don’t have to have in the digital era.
Ektachrome E100, Dehancer
The solution
Life is a compromise, anywhere you look. I will stay with my Fujis, and I have to say I thoroughly enjoy using them.
Fujifilm cameras are famous for their film simulations, and they allow for an enormous level of flexibility and customisability for each film simulation, all done in camera to produce an almost finished jpeg.
The problem is that I prefer to shoot raw and then apply my profile to the files, do a little post processing and be done. Also I don’t play around a lot with many different film simulations or filters, presets or processing variations, because I want my work to be cohesive and have a consistent look throughout. This is also one reason why I don’t shoot black and white images: cohesiveness.
Still, that Ektachrome colour palette draws me…should I buy a preset, or even better, make my own? Unfortunately it’s very difficult to find a really satisfying preset, one that I really like, and even more difficult to create one.
But this is the way to get there, I need to have a good preset I can use to create a look I like for my work, kind of an Extachrome look.
But let’s get one thing off my chest first: the stupid debate about film look and the fidelity of te presets, emulations and simulations on digital.
Ektachrome E100, Dehancer
The paradox
We all have our favourite film look, the film stock that really touches your heart. At least, all of us that love film look! Look at Alex Webb and William Albert Allard with Kodachrome, David Alan Harvey with Kodachrome and Velvia (I know the controversy regarding him, but I still think his photography was wonderful), Kodak Tri-X 400 for Elliot Erwitt, Henri Cartier Bresson (later career) and Joseph Koudelka, and so on.
Each film stock has a fairly defined character, dictated by the emulsion chemical composition, its light gathering properties and colour dominance and its development chemicals and processes.
Take Ektachrome and Kodachrome for example: the first had a slightly more faithful colour reproduction, with cooler, bluer tones, whereas the second had stronger colours with a warmer cast and strong reds. Stock with different ISO (ASA) rating also changed the character. Kodachrome ranged from 8 to 200 ASA, Ektachrome from 32 to 400 ASA. The variations are vast.
Add to this that most colour films were daylight balanced, meaning that they were calibrated at around 5600K white balance, unless you chose Tungsten balanced film for shooting indoor in artificial light, and you can see that the film character was very specific and dependent on the film speed and type.
Then we have to remember that the rendering in the image can change depending on the chemicals used for developing and fixing the image, the time in and the temperature of the chemicals, and even according to the photographic paper the image will be printed on.
Even black-and-white film can take colour casts through residual sensitivity to UV or infrared.
Not to forget that film was shot using lenses that were a lot less perfect than now, less good in the corners, with a lot more spherical and chromatic aberrations, often poor flare resistance. And they also had colour casts.
Where is the paradox then?
“The paradox is that people expect any film simulation/emulation preset, profile or plugin to reproduce exactly the film stock character of their choice.”
Why is that paradoxical?
In the first place, because of all the variables we just spoke about above in the final image colour and contrast profile from film stock, chemicals, paper and even projector light temperature for slides.
And because every camera brand, every model, every sensor variation has a different colour profile. The difference might seem small within the same brand, but is there, and between different brands the differences are quite important.
How many times do we hear about Nikon colours, Canon colours, Fuji colours, Leica colours? The old debate about Canon vs Nikon colours, where the slightly warmer Canon palette seems to be better for skin tones and the slightly cooler Nikon palette for landscape and travel, has been ongoing since the inception of their digital cameras. Leica is renown for their wonderful colours out of camera, (according to some sources they modelled their colour palette after Kodachrome), and Fujifilm has stronger greens that were true on their film stocks and work wonderfully on landscape.
Another feature of digital cameras is that they allow you to choose the white balance for your images, or even better, will automatically choose it for you, looking for the most neutral rendering of the scene’s colour palette, with faithful colours (if there is such a thing).
Something that very few people consider is the fact that each lens also adds a colour cast to the image thanks to different types of glass used in the design and the proprietary lens coatings. Not to mention that digital camera lenses are a lot better than older film camera lenses, lending a different, higher contrast and sharpness profile to their older counterparts.
But wait, there is more! Whether you shoot jpeg or raw all the above is true. But then, if you want to use the simulations you have to shoot raw. And how do you open a raw file? Lightroom, Capture One, Affinity Photo, ON1 Photo Raw, DXO Photo, proprietary camera brand software? This is just off the top of my head ad I count 5 variations even before the camera brand softwares. All of them will interpret the raw data with a different colour profile, adding variation to the image colour palette and contrast profile again.
If that wasn’t enough, monitor colour calibration and brightness also makes a big difference to the final look. And if you don’t print your digital files, looking at an image on paper (film print) and on a screen (digital file) is vastly different: one is reflected light, and has to be looked at in daylight for the correct colours. The screen is projected light, obeying different physics for the colours and their interactions, plus the light itself has a temperature specific to the monitor and its calibration. If your monitor is not perfectly calibrated forget about accurate representation of colours!
How on earth can we expect film simulations to look anywhere close to the film stocks with all these factors coming into play?
Well, black and white is different, you might say?
Nope! Black and white images are converted from colour files, and the colour balance/profile influences the grey tones quite considerably, in a very similar way that colour filters do. So, each brand/camera/sensor/lens combination will render the grayscale slightly differently.
And the contrast, blacks, grey tones and highlights? Older lenses have less contrast, more spherical aberration creating slight blooming (glow for Leica aficionados) around edges and highlights, lighter blacks. More modern lenses have much higher contrast, burning the highlights and blocking the shadows more easily. They also prevent blooming and glowing and have a lot less veiling flare.
With all this in mind, we really have to change our expectations on film simulation and realise that if we want that film stock look exactly we only have two solutions: just shoot the film stock itself or use your favourite simulation/plugin/preset and tweak it to look like you want according to the equipment you use!
Ektachrome E100, Dehancer
Enter Dehancer
When Camilla from the Dehancer team contacted me to ask if I wanted to review their software, I was intrigued. Even before answering I downloaded the trial version and played with it. The converted images have a watermark in the middle, but it doesn’t prevent me from seeing the colour treatment their film stock emulations create.
When I opened the software for the first time I looked at the number of film stocks emulated there, scrolling through them: so many! And, guess what? Ektachrome E100 is right there. Awesome.
I have been looking at many versions of the Ektachrome simulations all over the place, and I will be honest: the Dehancer version is by far my favourite, bar none. It’s absolutely wonderful, and it’s consistently giving me results I really like. It just adds something to the images that I find very attractive.
What about the other simulations? I have been looking through them and they are really good, they have vastly different renderings and allow you to have a very wide range of outputs available, even before you start fiddling with all the controls on the Dehancer plugin. And believe me, there are so many controls you can get infinite variations of rendering of your images.
Let’s have a closer look at this Dehancer plugin: the version I’m reviewing is the Lightroom/Photoshop/Capture One/Affinity Photo plugin.
They also have plugins for video for Da Vinci Resolve, Premiere pro and Final Cut Pro, but I’m a stills photographer and the Lightroom one will suffice for me. I will talk about Lightroom as the post processing software because that’s what I use, but the process will be similar for other processing software.
They also have plugins for video for Da Vinci Resolve, for Premiere pro and for Final Cut Pro, but I’m a stills photographer and the Lightroom one will suffice for me. I will talk about Lightroom as the post processing software because that’s what I use, but the process will be similar for other processing software.
Let’s define what Dehancer isn’t first: it’s not a preset or profile pack, it’s a standalone software working as a plugin for your post-processing software of choice.
You develop your image in Lightroom (or the others listed above) and then export to Dehancer for applying the film simulation. When you are done in Dehancer, you save the image and it will appear finished back in Lightroom.
You have a choice to create a copy in Lightroom to modify in Dehancer, or you can modify the original – I always modify a copy, and it will be saved back into Lightroom as a .tiff stacked with the original image. This way I keep the original file in raw, the original processing, and also have the film simulation.
It’s much like getting the image in Photoshop from Lightroom and bringing it back when finished.
The interface
The interface couldn’t be easier: once Dehancer is installed it will appear in the Lightroom menu tab: Photo – Edit In – Edit in Dehancer Lightroom Plugin... ; it can be found also in the contextual menu if you right-click on the image, or you can use the shortcut Option-Command-E (I use a Mac). As soon as Lightroom has created the tiff copy the plugin will launch and you’re in Dehancer looking at your image and its interface.
To see the description of the images on mobile you have to turn the phone into landscape orientation…thanks Squarespace!
You will see on the left hand side the available simulations (over 60), the controls for filtering the film types like color negative, color positive, instant, motion picture, black and white, cross and exotic, plus favourites if you have already selected some.
Also, having selected the desired film, you can also push or pull it by up to 2 stops, creating vastly different looks, like this:
You can click on the preset tab and access a large number of preset variations as well, made by the Dehancer team or made by you: you can create presets, choosing an existing one and modifying it to your taste, then save it to apply it to other images. You can also import presets. I haven’t played too much with this section, but the level of processing that Dehancer allows is so powerful that you can really set your imagination and experimentation loose here.
On the right side of the interface we can see a slew of tabs with different ways of modifying the output. What really made me curious is the Film Developer section: I have never been myself in a darkroom, and I am planning to experience it sooner or later. But trying the different developers makes for really different results: I would love to know from you, the reader, if the developer changes in Dehancer reflect your darkroom experience in any way. In my case it just becomes a curiosity experiment, but then I’m not going to use it because it makes little sense to me when there is so much more to use to create your preferred look.
The source tab has controls that we can find directly in Lightroom as well, although I have used the exposure compensation here to correct the luminance changes when pushing or pulling the film. Temperature and tint compensation can really help in taming very strong colour casts from specific film stocks.
You also get many other levels of control on the colour, tonal range and black and white points (but in the form of sliders under the Film Compression and Expand tabs) and split toning (Color Head in Dehancer terms).
You can add grain in different sizes, patterns and for color negative or color positive character, halation, bloom, film damage and vignette, all giving a very fine level of control from a delicate touch to a heavy-handed modification. The sky is the limit, or rather good taste is required! Things can get ugly very fast, so be gentle with those sliders and you’ll get fantastic results.
You can zoom in 1:1 to study your grain, detail, the bloom and damage effects. You can switch on and off every tab, showing with and without the specific effect, or even the film stock itself, seeing the original and the simulation comparison very quickly.
Halation and bloom are seen easier on specular highlights and high contrast edges:
On the top right you also have the option to activate highlight clipping warning and to see the histogram. I all my screenshots you can see the luminance and RGB histogram below the image, I keep it active.
Overall the interface is clear, simple and very effective, with what I find to be a very shallow learning curve: you open the software and in minutes you’re off to the races, experimenting and creating with full freedom.
As soon as you’re done you can hit OK in the top right corner and literally in seconds you’re back in Lightroom with your tiff image there next to the original. Seamless! Your tiff image is like your printed image. And it should be printed in my opinion.
The simulations
The whole point of Dehancer is to recreate the film look for your images. The starting point to do so will be the simulations themselves: are they any good?
I will not pronounce and judgment on that for the reasons I listed above in the Paradox section. There is no such thing as a precise/perfect film simulation, only an interpretation from which you can then recreate your favourite look.
Do the simulations look anything like the film stock they claim to imitate? If you happen to remember a specific look that your film stock – developer (or lab) – paper combination gave you and also have the right combination of digital equipment made by camera brand and model and lens – camera profile – processing software – calibrated monitor – printer profile – paper stock then yes, the simulation is spot on. In the other 99.99999% of the cases there will be a discrepancy between expectation and actual look of the simulation.
With this premise, the over 60 basic simulations found in Dehancer have a very distinct character and are a fantastic starting point to create your look. I really enjoy a lot of the film stocks, and the vast differences between each of them allows for a really wide range of choices to start working from. In the video below you can see a green dominant colour image running through all the basic presets so you have an idea of the range of looks you can start from.
Here is an image with green dominance, running through all film simulations so you get the idea of the variety of simulations you can start from:
One thing that I would say is that you want to do an initial processing to prepare the image in Lightroom, getting the colour, exposure and contrast and white balance right before taking it to Dehancer. I don’t touch the colours in Lightroom before using the plugin, because I want Dehancer itself to get the film stock colour applied to a neutral image so I get the full advantage of all the hard work the Dehancer team has put behind their plugin. From there your freedom in recreating the film look according to your perception is immense.
But you do need to develop your images before throwing them at Dehancer, you will get much better results. Here is a before and after of the out of camera raw and the Extachrome E100 applied directly:
And here is the processed image and the Ektachrome E100 applied:
That makes a huge difference!
If you can’t find your simulation among the over 60 in the Film panel, go to the Preset panel and you’ll find a lot more possibilities there, with changes already applied to the simulations that will give you a much better idea about what you can do but also another wide range of starting points for getting that perfect film look.
My true opinion? I love these simulations. I truly do, and find them a lot less garish and exaggerated than many of the presets you can buy. They have a much more “filmic” look to me than so many of those presets that give you overly pumped colours, creating a very digital oversaturated image, or giving colour casts so exaggerated that would look weird in a film like Amélie (I loved that green cast look, but I wouldn’t use it on my images). Using some presets the faces of my subjects get completely dark, altering totally the tonal balance of the image. Needless to say, so many presets claim to be perfect or the best in the industry, but they are simply wrong from a post processing standpoint: they contain straightforward issues.
Have a look below at the original image processed by me to what I think is a good balance: my processing involves applying a profile I created myself that only works on the luminance (just the basic exposure and tone controls), leaving colours alone. Applying a profile leaves all the sliders at zero, giving maximum flexibility in post processing. The profile is applied at import, and apart from some exposure changes and maybe slight masking, the image is almost ready. I would publish it that way. The second image is the Ektachrome E100 straight film simulation without any additional modification from Dehancer, and a few more Ektachrome E100 presets (bought by me, but I won’t reveal the sellers). In every case the starting image is my processed original. I had to raise the exposure on a few of these presets because they made the image so dark it was unusable, but I always used +0.7 stops on all of them because that’s what I used on the original image, and the impression is that the presets not only get rid of that setting, but also darken the image considerably through tonal curves and sliders.
I vastly prefer the Dehancer version.
I think that if you put a little effort in getting your perfect preset in Dehancer it will be worth every penny you spent on the software compared to the amateurish presets that inundate the market.
Let’s have a look at a few images with a strong colour dominance with different film stocks applied: the first is always my version before the film simulation (you can see that because the film profile tab is unchecked. On the other images you can see which simulation you’re looking at on the left grid.
Let’s start with blue dominance:
Now red:
Yellow:
This is an image with a less vivid green dominance: let’s push and pull it, and see how to save a preset:
The price
The Dehancer plugin has a price of US $129 for a single year or US $199 for a lifetime licence. Such licence will allow you to get all future updates.
Pricey? Maybe, but there are a few things to consider.
Presets packs can cost anywhere from £5 for just a few to £100 or more for packages, and everything in between. They are often just presets that, when applied, move all the sliders considerably in your Lightroom develop module, taking away quite a bit of control after applying the preset. It’s better if they come as profiles as well, because you retain the full range of settings and slider values.
Still, these presets are mostly made by amateurs that eyeballed the film stock and got something they thought was a good approximation, not having tested the preset on a vast range of images and causing problems like the ones above for some of your own images. Even when the seller claims a scientific approach and sampling from real stock, paper, negatives and slides, the results can be…less than satisfactory.
I would like to really understand how much work actually went into making those presets and what level of competence the colourists (if any were involved) had.
Dehancer has a really different set of features and engine behind their software that make it worth a lot more. In the first place, real colourists were involved in the creation of the simulations. Also, the techniques, research and resources used for the creation of their film stock simulations is very extensive: please read this blog entry on their website to understand more about what it takes to create such software and level of quality.
Their software gives you a whole different level of power on your files, recreating a depth of control that is absolutely invaluable to create a credible film look, from a very gentle touch to a fully fledged old, expired stock developed 70 years ago.
The value of Dehancer is vastly superior to any preset I have tried personally.
To me, if you want to consistently create a film look in your portfolio and you value great quality, Dehancer is worth the asking price.
Ektachrome E100
Pros and cons: what I liked, what I didn’t
You might have gotten the impression that I loved using Dehancer Film, and you would be right. It’s a great plugin and I love its output. But it’s not all perfect obviously.
On the positive side, I find it to be the best, most pleasing film simulation set I have used. bar none. Also, the pure vastity of controls and customisation possible on every single film stock is astonishing and a fantastic tool to really get yourself a very personal look, or to recreate exactly what you had in mind for your favourite film stock. A unique feature is the fact that all the controls on the right side, from the grain to the film developer to the film compression are all unique algorithms for every specific film stock. So is the push and pull process. This is tremendous value for the stock emulation, and so much better than presets and profiles applied directly in Lightroom.
Another positive is the fact that, given the amount of customisation available, the learning curve is really shallow, you can find your way around in minutes. And it’s a lot of fun to experiment.
Something I really like (but it’s a personal preference) is that every simulation is applied without grain, and you can then add grain after the fact in the form you prefer. I’m not a fan of adding a lot of grain, and I appreciate this opportunity to have full control over its amount. If you’d like grain to be added automatically you just create your preset and voilà, it’s there for every image!
Did I find anything I didn’t like? of course I did, but only one is almost a deal breaker for me.
The unique real problem I have with this plugin is not a small one for me: batch processing, or rather the lack of it. I have been told that this is due to the actual architecture of Lightroom, that does not allow a plugin to batch process externally. Having said that, I shoot street, documentary and travel photography. this means that I want to process a high umber of images from a single shoot, from 10 to 200 according to the length of the trip. Also, I shoot weddings. Thousands of images per wedding, but I process only a few hundreds. The problem is that from a single shoot I’m not going to choose different profiles or processing styles, or film stocks. Consistency is key, to have a cohesive body of work. For that reason, I would want ot batch process all the images I selected from the shoot and have all of them with a consistent look. The real issue is taking every single image in Dehancer, applying the film stock/preset, export back to Lightroom, hundreds of times per shoot. I can’t do that. Too much time and hassle.
I know there is a workaround using Photoshop, but things can get quite complicated as workflow goes that way: we would now be using three different pieces of software and a specific process just to get the batch processed. I think it should be a lot simpler.
Other negatives? Yes, but very minor: should you want to process the same image in different ways you need to create as many tiffs in Lightroom and send them to Dehancer one at a time, saving one at a time, rinse and repeat. It would be great to have the option to save the tiff back to Lightroom without exiting Dehancer, then change stock/preset, re-develop the file and save another tiff, and so on.
The last parameters used will be remembered when closing the plugin saving the image back to Lightroom. They will then be re-applied next time you open another image in Dehancer: you need to remember to reset them. It’s a negative for me because if I wanted to repeat the same process again I would just create a preset and use that. Instead I saved a lot of files with a wrong parameter unknowingly until I checked them and saw there was a problem. Had to redo 34 of them…and that’s a lot of work, given the lack of a simple batch processing method.
Another nitpick I have is that it would be great if Dehancer saved in the file metadata at least the film stock used, to be able to archive them properly. I don’t think it is a big ask, even as a keyword this would be really helpful.
Lastly, the plugin is there, I can open it directly without using Lightroom: but I can’t just open a jpeg or tiff directly in it, it needs to come from Lightroom. I’m not talking about any raw, but jpeg and tiff, which are pretty universal formats, and Dehancer already reads them. Why would it not be possible to open directly in Dehancer and save to files? That would also solve my batch processing issue: allow a full folder to be loaded (I could export all the images I want to apply the film stock to in tiff in a folder) and apply the chosen developing to the whole lot, job done.
I can’t think of anything else for now, so let’s summarise:
PROS
Simply the best simulations I have worked with
Incredible levels of customisation of the simulations
Dedicated algorithms to each film stock
Easy to use
Fun to experiment with
Adds great value to the photographer’s workflow
Possibly uniquely suited to really recreate film look
CONS
No batch processing in Lightroom
Last parameters used stick for next image
No film metadata information saved
No direct jpeg/tiff import, has to go through Lightroom
Verdict
My verdict? I think this plugin could be a reference standard for film emulation. The sheer flexibility and level of control that you ave on your film simulations in incredible. If you can’t get the film look you are looking for and the film stock is in Dehancer you have to work harder. The tools are there and you will get it if you use it well,
I certainly don’t feel the urge to buy any film rolls any soon. Dehancer scratches that itch very, very well.
More sample images
A few more images in my beloved Ektachrome E100 simulation:
