Dehancer Pro: Reconciling Color Contrast And Tonal Contrast

Of the countless unique characteristics of traditional film, color contrast must surely rank as among the most distinctive. We’re talking here not about the orange/teal blockbuster look, but blue in the shadows and red tones in the mids and highlights. The Prokudin-Gorsky 1906 profile is just one of many in Dehancer Pro that displays this particular attribute quite nicely. Of course, color contrast goes hand in hand with tonal contrast, but since playing around with film emulation plugins, we’d been increasingly going for more translucent shadows rather than the signature inky blacks seen in the HDR demo videos used to show off TV sets on showroom floors; but we realize now that we’d strayed too far and we’ve restored the deep shadows without which the picture looks dreadfully thin and insubstantial. The attentive reader might also notice that we’ve gone back to applying grain to the footage, something we promised ourselves we weren’t going to do, since YouTube & Co. mess it up so badly, but hey.