Cullen Kelly Disentangles PFE Befuddlement

Part I: The State of HDR Film Emulation LUTs

Part II: Moving Beyond Traditional Film Print Emulation

Part III: CineD Review of Dehancer Pro

Part IV: Dehancer Print Film Profiles

Part V: Negative and Print Clarified

During an episode of Grade School, a weekly YouTube Live session where he answers questions on all things color grading, Cullen Kelly untangles the confusion surrounding print and negative emulation:

So, here’s the first thing to understand: when we talk about […] PFE or […] print film emulation […] we’re really talking about negative plus print film emulation, generally speaking. We need to understand that in a traditional film system, the entire thing is a black box that’s designed to work as a unit and that’s kind of one of the challenges […] A traditional film system is designed for the following: it’s designed to take light in and it’s designed to put light back out in the form of a projected print that looks good; that has a naturalistic and pleasing reproduction; it’s a black box. So, the idea of like, one of the [things] I’ve already talked a bunch of today about like, oh wouldn’t it be fun to sort of be able to like cut into that organism and extract like, oh ‘I just want this piece of it but not that piece’ and it is fun and it can be cool.

One of the least sensible axes to cut into that organism along is the axis or the dividing point between a negative and a print because there’s a ton of the behavior of a film negative that is done in preparation for the fact that it’s going to be going to a film print. So, [a] film negative was never designed to be pleasing or […] to produce great visual results in and of itself. Nor was a film print ever designed to be pleasing and produce optimal results in and of itself. It is designed to expect a negative input and a negative is designed to receive a print – a subsequent print transformation. So, that’s the first thing to understand. Now, what we can do, and what is very worthwhile to do is, we can still be modular in the sense that like okay, I’m going to be in a film system and I’m going to have separate modules for emulating negative and emulating print – I’m just simply going to understand that if I don’t marry my negative to a print or if I don’t marry my print to a negative I can’t necessarily expect great results because that’s not what the system I am mimicking or modeling was designed to do with these photons, with this light. So, they kind of marry together. So, that’s kind of principle number one to understand about neg emulation.

Part I: The State of HDR Film Emulation LUTs

Part II: Moving Beyond Traditional Film Print Emulation

Part III: CineD Review of Dehancer Pro

Part IV: Dehancer Print Film Profiles

Part V: Negative and Print Clarified