Don’t Buy Dehancer Plugin

If proper color management, working scene-referred or HDR are important to you, avoid the Dehancer plugin. For starters, it is limited to the Rec.709 color space.

“Since Dehancer asked me to make an honest review, I will talk about them [the bad things]. The first one, which would instantly be a deal breaker for many studios especially, is the really bad implementation of ACES. You have to understand that ACES is a huge color space intended to  over most capturing color spaces and all the display color spaces. However, the way that Dehancer works is the following: they convert the ACES CCT signal to Rec.709 with the official ACES ODT and its soon-to-be outdated RRT. Then they apply all of their tools inside of Rec.709, then they convert back to ACES CCT with the inverse Rec.709 ODT. And you can easily recreate this by setting up these nodes. And this has many problems. First of all, you are limiting the color space to Rec.709, so delivering P3 or HDR spaces later is already a problem.”

“Second of all, the official ACES ODTs are not perfectly inverse. That means by just applying the plugin in the clean slate mode so all of the tools are disabled, you are already clamping the signal. Look at this graph. There are no highlights above 100 nits, and a similar thing is happening when you use the DaVinci Intermediate preset. Again, they convert from DaVinci Intermediate to Rec.709. Here they already apply the DaVinci tone mapping and apply the forward OOTF twice, and then in the end, they convert back to DaVinci Intermediate with the inverse DaVinci tone mapping and the OOTF twice.”

“Now the next problem is also related to clamping. When you stretch the signal a bit too far before going into Dehancer, you will get artifacts. My guess is that there is a modulo function somewhere in the code that flips the incoming signal over. And this can become a problem easily when you push the specular highlights up with tools like the HDR wheels or the color wheels.” 

Fortunately, there are a number of HDR compatible film emulation LUTs and plugins to choose from, some of which are free:

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