Get the FILM LOOK with DEHANCER PHOTO - REVIEW (Lightroom & Photoshop)
Even when shooting digital, I always try to give my images a more pleasing and timeless "film look". That's why I'm so excited to share with you my thoughts on Dehancer Photo, a plugin for Lightroom Classic, Photoshop and Capture One that gives digital images the look and feel of classic, analogue film. Dehancer Photo includes many popular film emulations (Kodak Portra, Fujifilm Acros, Kodak Ektar, etc) as well as effects like halation and bloom to create a more authentic film look.
Download Dehancer Photo free trial:
https://www.dehancer.com/store/photo/pslr
Use promo code LIBASSI for 10% off at checkout
HOW FILM GRAIN WORKS IN DEHANCER:
https://blog.dehancer.com/articles/how-does-film-grain-work-in-dehancer-ofx-plugin
MORE ABOUT PUSH-PULL:
https://blog.dehancer.com/articles/what-is-push-pull-and-how-it-works
GREAT VIDEO ABOUT HOW DEHANCER HANDLES COLOR IMAGES:
https://youtu.be/wqXuTMxDypU
** DISCLAIMER **
Dehancer has not sponsored me or paid for this video. They provided a license for Dehancer Photo for the purpose of creating this video. No money changed hands and all opinions are my own.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION
The best way to get the film look is of course to shoot film! But that can be a really long difficult and expensive process, especially if you're just starting out. If you want to get that same film look when shooting with your digital cameras keep watching: this video is for you! Today we're going to be looking at a plugin for Lightroom Classic, Photoshop and Capture One called "Dehancer Photo", and this plugin can emulate a lot of different types of film stocks and transform your digital images into more "film-like" analog shots. So without further ado let's jump into it and see how it works.
Ok so here we are inside mi Lightroom catalog. As you can see I have one image here which is straight out of camera, I didn't do any editing to this. If you follow this channel and you know my work, you know that I always work in black and white: so in my usual workflow I would convert this image in black and white inside of Lightroom, do all my global adjustments and then move on to Photoshop to do all my film grain, dodging and burning, vignetting, all that good stuff. I'm not gonna go into detail about my usual workflow, because today we're talking about Dehancer, and to use Dehancer and get the best results, according to the guys at Dehancer, you need to prepare your images in a certain way. I'm going to put all the settings here on the screen, it's really easy they just want you to change the color profile to "Adobe standard" and then lower your exposure to "-1", lower your contrast to "-40", and then up your shadows to about "+60", and then they also want you to go into the detail tab here and get rid of all the sharpening and noise reduction that Lightroom applies by default. That's it, as you can see the image looks really dull this way but this is made in a way so that basically, as you can see here in the histogram, all the data is compressed in the middle of the histogram and we have a really raw file to work with. I'm also I'm gonna do tick these two boxes that I always do just to remove chromatic aberration if there is any and to enable profile Corrections for the lens. And that's basically it! So according to Dehancer in this way we can just jump into the plugin and start editing the picture. One thing to note here is: in order to export this and work with Dehancer this needs to be a TIFF in sRGB color profile 16 bit. So how do you export that? You need to go to the Lightroom preferences, go here into the preferences into external editing, you want to set up your additional external editor as Dehancer with file format TIFF, sRGB, 16 bits and then resolution is basically up to you, I always use 350. Once you have this set up and you save it as a preset you can go in here right click to your image and do "edit in Dehancer Lightroom plugin" and we're gonna need to use this "edit a copy with Lightroom adjustments" so basically Dehancer is not going to edit your raw file directly, but it's going to create a TIFF file, a copy of it, import it into your Lightroom catalog and then just start edit.
So here we are inside the plugin. Here on the left side you have your film emulations and also you have your presets, if you want to change any of these with custom settings you can save them as presents. On the right side you have all your settings here that you can change depending on the image, and we're going to go through all of these later on in the video. Then of course you have your preview here in the middle, and then at the top you have a couple of buttons: you can of course undo and redo, you can reset all the settings to their defaults, you can go to the previous used settings which is pretty useful if you're editing multiple images, you can hide this left tab here if you want to get more real estate for editing your image, and also you have this icon here for the settings, and you can go in here and the great thing that they do here at Dehancer is that they store all these film stock simulations on their server, and once you have an account with them you can just click on this and you can get all the updates or possibly all the new film simulation that they might add to the plugin just by clicking on this, which is really good.
Let's start editing an image. As I said I always work in black and white, so I'm going to choose black and white in here, and you can see all the different types of black and white emulations that you can do inside Dehancer Photo. So my absolute favorite film in the world is Fujifilm Acros, I use it all the time even when I shoot film, so I'm going to select that, as you can see it's one of my favorites. So I'm going to click on that and as you can see the default settings for this film are already applied to my image, and I can see it here. I can of course zoom in to see it at 100% and I can toggle the preview on and off, and as you can see it looks really nice straight out of the bat. The only thing that I would say bothers me a little bit is that, at least in my eyes there is a slight green cast, and you can see it also here in the in the histogram. I did reach out to the guys at Dehancer and asked about that, and the reason for this green cast is that they print and test all their film simulations on this particular paper which has this green cast to it, so basically that's the reason why, it's a really accurate simulation of the film printed on a paper with a slightly green cast. So that's the reason for it, I don't particularly like it but there is a really easy fix for this that I'm going to show you in a second. For now let's stick with the default settings that Dehancer inputs for Acros, so this is the default settings, and then we can of course tweak all these settings here to our liking, and there's a bunch of them and let's just start from the top.
So the top one is called "Source" and this is not really useful for black and white, because of course we are working in black and white, it's more useful for colors but basically you can tweak your color temperature, your tint, defringe a little bit if you didn't apply a chromatic aberration correction in Lightroom. Whatever I do here it doesn't really change my image too much, it might change the overall brightness slightly but it's mainly for color images so I'm gonna skip through this one.
Then we have "Expand" and with this tab what we can do is for example if we think that our blacks are too black or not black enough and we want to give more of a, like a matte feel to them, we can use this black point, we can move it on the left, and as you can see as I move it on the left I get more like open shadows and a more matte-like quality to my image, or I can go the other way around and make it much darker, which of course is too much, for my liking maybe I will just go -2 or something on this one, nothing really crazy, as you can see it's just a slight difference. In the same way you can use the white point to change the way your highlights are affected here in the image, you can brighten up your image by going all the way, of course is too much just to show you, or you can go the other way and make everything more dull. In this particular case I think I want to make it slightly brighter than what it used to be, so I'm gonna go on the left here and as you can see it's just a couple of sliders but they make quite a big difference.
Moving on to the "Print" tab here, and in this tab you can do a lot of different tweaks to your image. I'm not gonna go too much in detail into this one as well but the main thing that I want to talk about about this is: I talked about the green cast for this particular image, one easy fix for it is this saturation tab here, which of course it's really useful when you're working with color images, but even when you have a black and white image with some kind of color cast if you just reduce the saturation here you'll see that you get a more neutral black and white. You're basically removing saturation from the film simulation. So for this particular shot I like it neutral so I think I'm gonna just remove all the saturation and bring it down to 0. As you can see it's really neutral black and white now, and then you can do of course other tweaks here, and there is a tonal contrast here which increases the overall contrast of the image, so you can use this: if you lift it up you see you can get darker blacks and whiter whites of course, and if you put it on the right side - on the left side sorry - you get less contrast overall. In this particular case maybe I'll just lift it up ever so slightly, and as you can see by especially changing the saturation you see that this changes the image quite a bit. And then there is an exposure slider here at the top, which of course changes the exposure, and as you can see here you can brighten up the image or you can darken it up. In this particular case I like the overall exposure, maybe I'll just lift it up slightly like so. Depending on the image of course you can make much more drastic changes here in the print tab.
Okay, moving on to "Color Head", and of course as the name suggests this is more useful for color images of course, but is also another way that you can use to remove color casts for black and white. So let me go back to the print tab and bring back the saturation to 100% so I get my green cast back. When I'm in this color head basically what I can do is add or subtract any of these colors from the image overall. So for example if I move this "yellow-blue" slider on the right I get a bluer tint of course to my image, if I go the other way around you get a yellow tint okay? So that's the way it works. In this particular case since I have a green cast I can subtract a little bit of this green by moving the "magenta-green" slider to the left ever so slightly, and I will probably get almost the same result as removing saturation in this case because the only color cast that I have is green. So let me try that and as you can see if I go on the left the image becomes more neutral. You can also see in the histogram that the colors overlap a little bit more. So if you go too crazy of course you're gonna get everything magenta which you don't want, but I think something really slight like -5 on this slider gives you really good results for this black and white, as you can see here the histogram seems to think the same way as I do. So either way, to remove a color cast you can use the color head for black and white or you can use the saturation on the print. Let's stick with this color head for now. Of course if you're shooting and editing color images this section here has much more functions that are useful for you. For black and white not so much but yeah that's just the way black and white works.
Okay so moving on to my favorite tab here which is "Film Grain". I love film grain, and if you look at this image now it is in black and white of course, and the emulation made something good to it make made it look a little bit more like film, but of course one of the main characteristics of film that digital doesn't have is grain. If I zoom in 100% on this image you see that it's really clinical, really clean, and there is no noise, there is no grain here in the water or in the sky. It's real but it kind of looks fake for lack of a better word. But you see the moment I tick this film grain tab on we are going to get a lot of really nice thin grain on top of our image, and that is going to look much more like film that it would without grain. So there are so many options here, that's one of the reasons why I love this tab so much, and maybe I think it's a better idea to do this at 100%, so we do have "Size" "Amount" "Resolution" "Shadows" "Mid tones" "Highlights" and "Color". Of course for black and white we don't want to go into the color here, but let's look at the others. So grain is different for different types of film, for different type of sensitivity film, and of course there are really fine grains, really big grains, so you can do whatever you want with this tab to make the grain look bigger, smaller, and to add more amount of grain. And you can see when you move these sliders around the algorithm calculates what to put in the shadows, what to put in the highlights, what to put on the mid tones. And it's a digital algorithm according to Dehancer, but it's an algorithm based on scanning lots of different types of films and extrapolating the grain patterns of all these different types of real film, so it really looks not digital, not machine generated, not AI generated, it looks like organic grain which is something I really really like. So as I said the size, you can change the size of the actual grain, so you can make it bigger, you can make it smaller, personally I like fine grain more than really big grain, so I'm usually keeping this at around maybe 2 or something like that. And then you can of course change the actual amount of grain in the image overall. At the moment is 20, which is a good starting point. Depending on the image or the effect that you want to achieve you can go crazy and you can go really high, but as you can see some of the images might become really really grainy, so it might not be the effect that you want to get. I think the default setting of 20 is actually pretty good in this case, so I'm going to keep it that way. The other thing that is really nice about this film grain tab is that you can change how grain affects different parts of the image, so shadows mid tones and highlights, because of course any different type of film apply grain, or let's say grain is applied differently, in the highlights in the shadows and in the mid tones. So for example in this image let's say I want to have less grain here in the shadows, I just need to lower down this slider for the Shadows and it's gonna give me less grain in the shadows overall. This is really really nice, it's something that other plugins don't have so much, it's difficult to emulate and it's something that is really film like. Film works like that, some types of film have less grain in the shadows, some other types have more grain in the shadows, so it's really really nice to be able to edit the different parts of the image. In this case I don't mind a little bit of grain in the shadows. And then let's have a look at the highlights for example 20. So if I want to check the highlights here, the brightest part of the image. I don't mind grain in the highlights, so I can also try and bring this up 70 or something like so. I think it actually looks pretty good. And also you can go in the mid tones, something like the water in this case, and you can decide if you want to have less grain, more grain, and you can see that that really changes the overall look of the image. If the mid tones grain is not that high this kind of looks still a little bit digital, but the moment you bring this up everything looks much more like film. And in this particular case it's because most of the image is actually mid tones, so this slider is the one that makes the biggest changes overall in the image. As I said there is a color slider here in the film grain, which of course doesn't do anything when you're working with black and white. If you're working with a color image you can use that to add some type of color to your grain, but it's not something that I'm really into so I'm gonna undo that. So here we have our image, you can also choose the type of film that you're working on, in this case where we're working with black and white negative film so we're gonna leave it to negative, if you're working with slide film you can use positive, and of course they have this option called "digital" which is I think a different algorithm to process the grain, but I think this "analog" one works pretty well.
The next two Tabs are "Halation" and "Bloom", which are two effects that occur with film when you're taking pictures in color mostly, and also mostly at night with artificial light. So I don't shoot at night, I don't shoot color and I don't shoot artificial lights, and so I can't really show you how these two tabs work. I'm gonna put a link up here to a video that explains that much better than I will ever be able to do, so if you're interested in how to use halation and bloom go and check that video out, after you finish watching this one of course!
And then let's move on to the last step which is the "Vignette", so the vignette one is nothing special, it's like the vignette that you can get in Lightroom or in Photoshop or any other editing software. So you basically have your size, your feather and your aspect ratio, so what you can do to see your vignette better is you can reduce the feather to 0 so you basically see the round shape of the vignette. You can choose how dark you want to make it, for my images I usually put a vignette around at about -1, I'm just gonna type that in, and then I like it round but you can change the aspect ratio and make it more oval either vertical or horizontal. In this case I prefer the normal one so -1. So you can change also the size of the vignette, in this way you can make it smaller, you can make it bigger and you can decide basically where to focus your viewers attention. In this case I think since the main subject is in the middle the standard settings of 50 or something in that ballpark actually works really well, -1 and then we're just gonna up the "feather" so you can see that the vignette gets faded. Again, nothing special about this vignette but it's pretty good to be able to do it together with the film simulation and the grain all in one package. So that's it, once you are happy with your editing, and I am, you just click ok, and as you can see now in our catalog we have a TIFF file here which is a copy of our original raw file with our Dehancer plugin film simulation applied. I think it's really good, it looks really really nice. Let's jump into Photoshop and see how we can do something even better in there!
So using Dehancer Photo in combination with Photoshop has a couple of advantages. First of all you can use this filter on smart objects, which is really really powerful, because you can do an edit and then you can go back if you're not happy with it and you can change and tweak the settings as you want to, which is something you cannot do in Lightroom where everything is baked-in basically in your TIFF files. And another thing that you can do is you can use the plugin in combination with Photoshop layers, so that gives you a lot of flexibility to apply certain types of editing just to certain parts of your image. So let's see how it works! I'm here inside of camera raw, I have the same image opened up, I'm gonna do the same preparation Dehancer wants me to do to edit the image, so I'm going to change this to Adobe standard, I'm gonna bring down the exposures to -1, and bring down the contrast to -40, shadows to +60, go to the detail tab and bring down the sharpening and the color noise reduction, and tick these two boxes as usual. Then in order to open this as a smart object you have to go in here and make sure that this box here is ticked, so "Open in Photoshop as smart object". If this is not selected you cannot open anything as a smart object, so just select that and as you can see this is already set up for Dehancer to work perfectly, so it's sRGB, 16 bits, resolution is 350 like in my previous example in Lightroom. So we just go on and "open object" and this is going to open inside Photoshop. So when I apply Dehancer to my layer it's going to apply to the actual layer I'm working on, so what I like to do is I like to duplicate my layer, which I can do on my keyboard by using "Command+J" on a Mac or "Ctrl+J" on a Windows machine, and then I'm going to do "Filter", "Dehancer", "Dehancer film". And you can see here I'm gonna get the same plugin that we used in Lightroom, so I'm not going to go through all the options again, I just want to make sure that everything looks fairly good and then I'm just gonna say "OK", and as you can see this is going to apply the filter to my image. It's really fast, it's much faster than by using Lightroom in my opinion, so that's it and now let's say I think I did something wrong in this image, and maybe it's too bright which it is actually. If I was in Lightroom there won't be any way to revert this, I would need to re-edit the image from scratch, but since this is a smart object what I need to do is just to go here and double click on "Dehancer film" and then I can change these options. As you can see here I changed something in the print, so if I just reset this, and it's going to look much much better, and I'm just going to bring it up to something that looks a little bit better to my eye, something like this, I'm going to say okay and as you see the plugin is just going to be updated on the fly on my smart object, which is really really powerful. Another thing that you can do is: let's say I want to change how the filter looks just on a part of the image, maybe on this rock. What I can do is I can duplicate this layer again, and then I can go in and do all the type of editing that I want to make this rock look exactly the way I want it. For example I would probably increase the exposure slightly to make it brighter, not too much, and I will probably add a little bit more contrast as well. Then I'm gonna apply this and as you can see this is going to apply the effect to all the image, but what I can do is I can add a mask here by clicking on here, then I can invert it and in this way if I choose a brush by using "B" on my keyboard I can go in and I can just brush in the effect on the part of the image that I want to apply the effect to. In this case the rock, and as you can see if I turn this on and off it is subtle but it's certainly a really nice improvement in the image at least in my opinion, and it is something that I wouldn't be able to do by just using Dehancer in Lightroom but I can do with using Dehancer in combination with layers in Photoshop. So this is the best way in my opinion to use this plugin, in combination with Photoshop, so I went back and re-edited some of my old images by using this technique.
So this was Dehancer Photo, a really nice plugin in my opinion that will help you transform your digital images and give them a really nice film look. Is it perfect? No, because nothing in life is ever perfect, but I think overall it's a pretty solid product that will really help you transform your images and make them better. Particularly I like the way the plugin handles film grain, I think having all those options it's really really powerful, especially in conjunction with smart objects in Photoshop. The one thing that really concerns me is the fact that the plugin at the moment only works with sRGB which is a really small color profile, but I'm sure with future updates the plugin will also support other profiles like Adobe RGB and hopefully maybe even Profoto. Who knows! So if you want to try out the plugin for yourself just go to the Dehancer website and you can download the free trial: try it out and if you like what you see you can use this discount code here to get 10% off at checkout. All right that's gonna be it for today's video, hopefully it was useful. Thank you ever so much for watching, I hope you have a great day and see you in the next one!