love the look of film but prefer the convenience of digital photography then you might be
interested in this new film emulation plugin if you don't know about dehancer they produce
plugins for the popular davinci resolve video editing software from blackmagic these people
know a thing or two about making digital video look like it was captured on film well now they've
turned their attention to still photography with their film plugin for photoshop and lightroom
let me give you a demonstration of the new plugin after which i'll tell you a little bit more about
some of the things i've discovered while using it this is the image i'll be using for the
demonstration and i have it open in photoshop i'm using photoshop but the plugin is just the same in
lightroom the image i'm using was shot as a raw file and i've applied some basic corrections to
this to get the starting image but before i launch the dehancer film emulation plugin i'll duplicate
the image layer by pressing command j on my keyboard this is the layer that i'm going to apply
the film emulation to with the new layer selected in the layers window click the filter menu to open
the dehancer film plugin when the plugin opens we see an image preview in the center the plugin
interface is clean and simple with a few icons along the top and effect controls down the right
i'll start by clicking the reset icon to clear any settings that are remaining from previous editing
then i can pick the film emulation to use from the list of thumbnails on the left there's a
lot of thumbnails in the list but you can filter them by picking the type of film in the drop down
at the top if i pick color negative the list then displays the individual profiles in that category
this profile list is the same as the thumbnails whilst i've found the thumbnails helpful to
visualize an emulation that i don't know they are a little small to properly appreciate the film
i've personally found it better to click on the ones i think might work well and then judge the
effect on the larger preview image but what i really love is the list of films dehancer
has chosen for the plug-in there's a nice mix of common films like fuji provia and kodak hectare
but there are also specialist films that you might only find in cinematography and some of these are
truly beautiful let's pick the kodak minolta vx400 super film for this image i think this produces a
wonderful look that really suits the scene and creates the mood i'm looking for if you want
to compare the effect with the original click the preview option in the toolbar to toggle it
off and on alternatively you can press and hold the spacebar key to temporarily disable the effect
until you release the key after choosing a film emulation there's an option to push or pull the
exposure if you're familiar with film photography then you'll probably recognize these terms
when we push a film we reduce the exposure time when we shoot by rating the film at a faster speed
if we have a 400 speed film and we push it one stop we're shooting as if we're using an 800 film
in this image the area below the pier is quite dark when i move the push pull slider to the
left it pushes the exposure which lightens the shadows you can see the adjustment displayed as
an ev value or number of stops in the readout to the right of the slider moving the slider in
the opposite direction pulls the exposure which has the opposite effect what i like about this
is that it simulates a valuable film photography technique combined with the film emulation after
selecting my film emulation i'm going to collapse the profiles panel to create more space i'm then
going to apply additional effect adjustments using the controls on the right unlike most of the other
film simulation plugins i've used these settings aren't affected by my choice of film emulation
these are additional settings used to add effects and refine the image for example whilst i like the
film emulation i've chosen it's making the sky in my image appear too cool i can then adjust
this by increasing the temperature control the temperature slider works just as you might expect
in a raw converter move it to the right to warm the temperature and left to cool it let's set this
to a value of around 25 to warm the image slightly whilst there are several other adjustments i can
apply there are only two that i want to apply to this image the first of these as you might expect
is a film grain let's magnify the image to 100 so we can see the grain a bit better it's probably no
surprise that you use the size and amount sliders to control the look and visibility of the grain
but there are a couple of other controls to refine the overall look of the grain
first there's the resolution slider which controls how the grain softens the image
film images tend to be softer than digital images because of the grain and developer used
look at what happens to the detail in this image when i turn off the film grain panel
it becomes much sharper again if you like this softer appearance you can control it by reducing
the resolution slider if you'd rather have a sharper image increase the resolution slider
the other feature is that we have independent controls for the grain in the shadows mid-tones
and highlights i've only seen this feature in one other plugin and i think it's great in
addition to adding film grain the other effect i want to use is bloom if i turn on the panel
you can see the effect it's having it creates a kind of halo around lighter areas of the image
the defaults a little strong for this image so i'm going to adjust it i want to create
the effect of light reflecting on the bright surfaces in the image i won't explain what
the individual sliders do in this video though because it's just an overview instead i'll apply
some settings i've previously worked out i'll use 40 for the highlights 55 for the source limiter
25 for the detail and 35 for the diffusion the amplifier slider i'll set to 60 and save lights
is 70. i can then control the strength of the effect using the impact slider when i turn the
blue panel adjustments off you can see the effect they're having on the image so far i've found it
very easy to work with the plugin controls but there are some additional features i'd like to see
added or improved i'll share most of these later in the video but one i want to highlight here is
to save panel presets it's time consuming creating different effects with controls in panels like
bloom being able to save the settings as presets that you can then reapply would be useful you can
though create your own presets containing all of the adjustments including the film emulation it's
then possible to reuse those presets with other images you might edit in the future
checking the overall preview i think the image now has a nice feel to it i'm happy so i'll click
the ok button and return to photoshop i'm really impressed by the renderings this plugins produced
now that you've seen the software let me answer a few questions you might have
if you're wondering is this a page review no it's not dehanzer has kindly provided a license key for
me to do the review but there's been no payment and they've encouraged me to give an honest review
if they hadn't i wouldn't be making this if you're a pc user you may be wondering will this work on
windows unfortunately not at present although the dehuncer website says that they are working on a
windows version a popular question amongst mac users for most software these days is does it
support the m1 chip yes it does when you purchase the plugin the download contains a separate intel
and m1 version now cast your mind back to the overview where i applied the plugin to a new layer
if you're wondering does it work with photoshop smart objects the answer is yes if i duplicate the
image layer and then convert it to a smart object i can apply the dehuncer plugin as a smart filter
after applying my adjustments and closing the plugin it appears as a smart filter in the layers
window then if i want to change my settings i can double click the filter to reopen the dehancer
film plugin now i know a lot of people watching my videos use affinity photo rather than photoshop
if you do you're probably wondering does it work with affinity whilst i haven't tested
it extensively yes it does appear to work with affinity photo after installing the plugin to
photoshop all i needed to do was point affinity to my photoshop plugin folder if you don't know how
to do that i'll put details of my video explaining it in the youtube video description the dehancer
plugin then appears in the finity photo plugin list and i was able to use it what i don't know
is if you can install the dehancer plugin if you don't have photoshop or lightroom on your computer
i also don't know if the plugin is compatible with photoshop elements as i can't try that
my best advice would be to download the trial version to see if you can install it and use it
now let's talk about a few improvements that i would personally like to see in the software
first there are the controls where i found some sliders very sensitive most of the time
you only need to make small changes but at times it can be difficult it would be nice to see some
sort of fine adjustment control next we have the icons in the toolbar although there are only a few
of these it would be nice to have the option of tooltips when hovering the mouse pointer over them
then there's something that caught me out a few times which is the plugin remembered my previous
settings i think it would be nice to have a preference to automatically reset the adjustments
when opening but i think the reason i found this more frustrating was that the plugin only supports
the srgb color space dehanzer are working on others but for the moment you need to change
your color space to srgb if you try editing an image in something like pro photo rgb you'll see
a color shift in the image what tended to catch me out was that i thought something was wrong with
the colors but often i mistook it for the film emulation so before launching dehancer convert
your working color space to srgb you can also do this automatically in photoshop color settings
but if like me you need to use a color space other than srgb as your default you'll need
to convert each image before opening it in the plugin finally i should mention the cost as this
isn't a cheap plug-in at the time i recorded this it's 199 for two seats but that's excluding v80
despite these points overall i'm extremely impressed by this plug-in i found it extremely
stable and very easy to use i also love the quality of the results i've been able to produce
now i haven't based my quality assessment on the technical accuracy of the film emulations
because i don't have the facilities to do that instead i'm judging how the image looks
and the feeling it conveys what i would encourage you to do is download the trial
version to see what you think i hope you've enjoyed this video and decide to watch more
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