u/Silly_Author_7330

The workflow took a bit of getting used to. It’s very different from most workflows that I’ve worked with. One thing that really threw me is that the settings on the right-hand side affect every film profile the same, and when opening Dehancer, those settings remain as they were the last time Dehancer was used.

For example, I do the required export settings for ACR (exposure -1, contrast -40, blacks +60) and export to Dehancer.

I start by choosing a film profile, but they all look pretty much as flat as the original.

Then I go to the presets and choose Cinestill 50, and it looks amazing.

When I go back to film profiles, the preset for Cinestill 50 remains unchanged, regardless of what film profile I choose. This was counterintuitive to me as the FilmSim programs I worked with previously, the settings changed with whatever film profile I chose.

I’m curious how others work, do you start with a film profile and modify it then look apply other profiles to see how different film stock changes the look? Or do you find a preset that gets you close and modify it?

Dehancer for Photoshop.

What I should my histogram look like before opening in Dehancer? I don’t clip on either end, but I still seem to get very different, almost random results from similar image to similar image. Sometimes it’s much darker than expected and I can’t track down what’s making it like that.

I see a lot of crew posts clinging on to a movie industry paradigm of years ago. I don't intend this to be all doom and gloom, but my perspective having lived through a very similar transformation in the music/recording industry. Much of it is good news, unless change is something you're not willing to embrace.

I'm a director. I work in entertainment and commercial production. I came from the music industry. I founded a recording studio that's been in business for 36 years. And I see all the same trends happening in film production that I saw when I decided to leave.

Recording albums used to be quite a production.

In the 1960s, making a record required renting a studio, renting the gear, and staffing two rooms full of people. In the control room: a producer, a recording engineer, a couple of assistants, a tape operator, a mix engineer, a mastering engineer. Eight people, give or take, plus the inevitable useless cadre of suits from the label. In the live room: union musicians, piano, drums, bass, guitar, brass, strings, percussion, plus an arranger, a conductor, the songwriters. Twenty, thirty people to make an album.

Over time, that changed. By the 90s, you had a band, a producer, an engineer, maybe an assistant. You still rented the studio. You still bought 2" tape that held three to five songs. But you could make a record with four or five people if you needed to.

Now I have a digital studio with unlimited tracks on my laptop. I don't need to record anything. Samples and loops are everywhere, many free. No engineer, no producer, no musicians required. I can make an entire album of professional quality in my bedroom for nothing.

I'm what they call "a creator."

The parallel to film is exact, and obvious to anyone who watched the music industry go through it. It just took longer to arrive here. TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, DSLRs, editing software, AI. The tools democratized and the gatekeepers got bypassed. The economics collapsed and rebuilt around something nobody in the old system wanted to admit was coming.

We are in the early stages of legitimate self-produced film content. But it will only get more powerful and less expensive. Creators will be their own studios, their own distributors. The large film companies (like the major labels before them) will become largely decorative. They will exist at the mercy of the people who actually make things. Artists now get signed based on their Instagram audience. They’ve done all the work already.

This is both good and bad, and it's worth being honest about both.

The good: power returns to the creative. The barrier between an idea and an audience collapses. Geography, access, connections... none of it matters the way it used to.

The bad: creativity and ambition are not the same thing, and ambition is easier to scale. The music industry didn't democratize and suddenly produce more Joni Mitchells. It produced more content. More not better. The most successful artists in the streaming era aren't necessarily the most interesting ones, they're the most relentless ones. If creativity and commercial success were the same thing, we wouldn't have shitty content. But we have loads of it.

There will still be large movie studio productions, the same way there are still Sabrina Carpenters and Olivia Rodrigos, polished, well-funded, broadly consumed. But the Lola Youngs of film, the talented ones doing something genuinely new and strange and worth paying attention to, will be working small, working cheap, and working outside the system entirely. Just like they always have. Only now, they won't need anyone's permission to have global distribution.

Unions will shrink. Traditional careers will be hard to sustain. Work on major productions will be scarce and increasingly AI-assisted. And the most interesting films will be low-budget and authentic, which, if you've been paying attention, is how the most interesting films have always been made anyway.

FM radio was once the only thing that mattered in music. If you weren't on it, you didn't exist. It was the gatekeeper, the tastemaker, the distribution system, and the marketing department all in one. The record labels ran it; you needed a record label promotional department for access. Now nobody listens to FM radio. Not really. It slowly became irrelevant while everyone was looking somewhere else. Networks are already AM radio, and cable TV is FM radio.

They feel permanent right now, but the people who grew up on TikTok and YouTube don't experience film or storytelling the way previous generations experienced it. The platform shift already happened.

The music industry didn't end. It transformed into something the people running it in 1975 would not have recognized. The studios will adapt or become catalogs. The unions will negotiate with a reality that has already moved on. And somewhere right now, someone with a camera, a laptop, and something genuine to say is making the film that will matter most this decade. They're doing it alone, or nearly alone, for almost nothing.

Francis Ford Coppola’s observation just took longer to come true: "To me, the great hope is that now these little 8mm video recorders and stuff have come out, and some... just people who normally wouldn't make movies are going to be making them. And you know, suddenly, one day some little girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart and make a beautiful film with her little father's camera recorder. And for once, the so-called professionalism about movies will be destroyed, forever. And it will really become an art form. That's my opinion."