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better colours

why do i write this? i love film colours, and most of the times i don't like digital colours out of the camera.

so there is this russian photographer - pavel kosenko. he also didn't like the colours he was getting with digital cameras, even after lots of editing, and so he started to research: read many books about colours, photography, cinema, etc. his research led him to writing a book, called 'lifelike' - it is now available in english here: https://blog.dehancer.com/lifelike-book/

if you want to know some history - he came up first with photoshop action script called 'degradr', then after several versinos he realized he needs an application that can be programmed, not an action script and released an ios app called 'degradr'. then he removed the app from the appstore and came up with the macos program called 'dehancer'.

today dehancer is available as davinci resolve plugins, i guess photoshop or lightroom plugins, and maybe as standalone macos application. it is also available as an ios app. but it requires subscription.

what is that application? pavel kosenko worked a lot on creating LUTs from film stocks. he developed a technology with following steps: shoots a colour checker on this or that film stock with reference light, also by overexposing and underexposing it. then he develops the film, prints the film on paper analog way, then scans the paper with the calibrated scanner, and then creates a LUT from it.

his programs apply the LUTs he creates, as he describes it, by taking in to consideration psycho-physiological perception qualities of humans. i guess that means he applies them non linear way, by usin s curve.

so i recommend to read the book, and to try out the plugins.

i met him in person, i showed him that i was able to use sort of 'grabbed' from dehancer luts on my linux phone. i told him - because there is no linux version. he said - there is already a linux version, because some british company that is engaged in colouring the films was interested and they work under linux.

anyway, on my gentoo many things don't work because i compile it in a way it stays simple and minimalistic.

so i use some HALD CLUTs of questionable quality and based on his LUTs and available here: https://github.com/norayr/home_sweet_home/tree/master/scripts/sailfish/Pictures/Camera/dhnc.

i use then imagemagick's convert binary to apply those luts to my photos in this way:

convert in.jpg fujichrome-sensia-400-exp-2011.png -hald-clut out.jpg

after that i often feel the need to auto white balance which i also do with custom gimp plugin and script that calls gimp to auto white balance. or with imagemagick.

so i hope to see the world with better colours (i understand that 'better' looks arguable) in photos.

i tried many many many film luts created by different people and i believe pavel's luts are the best. alas he does not sell the lut files, he sells plugins.

i recommend all the people i see, who runs ios, to use dehancer to edit the photos.

so i recommend to try dehancer to you as well.

i think you'll be very impressed by his work.

and read the book.

and well, you can also try poor man's solution maybe.

i guess i also will produce my luts one day. but this day is not close yet.

Posted in: s/Photography

🐙 norayr

Jul 15 · 5 months ago · 👍 stack