How To Turn Your Digital Photos to Film, Without Actual Magic. Dehancer Review A-Z.
Hello friends and neighbors. Today I feel like I’m getting somewhere. Dehancer, a company in the editing software space, reached out to me for an honest review about their plugin. I’m not getting paid or anything, but I still feel like it’s nice to be recognized as a photographer. But enough about me, let’s get back to Dehancer.
What is Dehancer?
Just a brief intro, this is a plugin for your editing software. It’s main focus is to filter your digital work, to give it a more authentic film or analog look. I suppose in a world where everything seems enhanced, they thought it would be nice to dehance some things too. In this series, I’m going to walk you through from installation to the final result of my work in a small series I’m creating for you and we’ll see if it fits into my work flow, and whether it’s worth buying. So let me just bring you in at the beginning, and we can talk about how to get this installed. I’m not sure if this is backwards, but we’ll talk about the how first, and then the what and why later.
PC/MacOS compatibility to use Dehancer?
Let’s start with Software Capability for your Mac. For photo editing you have to use Lightroom, Photoshop, CaptureOne, or Affinity to be able to install the plugin into your photo-editing programs. Whichever program you use, be sure that you have Mojave 10.14.5 or later version. I wasn’t sure what version I had, I went to top-left corner on my Desktop and clicked on the Apple icon. My Mac has the ventura 13.2.1 which is the latest version of MacOS. If you know your version but not sure where it fits in the timeline, you can find your version here.
Same requirement goes for video editing programs, Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro,you need to have a compatible Mac released from middle 2012 with MacOS Mojave or later installed and updated.
Does Dehancer work with Windows?
If you're a Windows user, as long as you have the Windows 10 64 bit, you can use this plugin on premiere pro, photoshop, lightroom and the like. On the manual, it’s highlighted for windows users that that genuine licensed installation is required to be able to run this plugin smoothly. I’m not sure if you can use like a bootleg version on mac but not windows, but it seems like a good thing to take a note of.
Does Premiere Pro work with Dehancer?
We can now check the Version of Windows/Mac operating system off the list. Next one to look at before installing the plugin is: the version of the editing program you have. The plugin should work on earlier Adobe product versions but Dehancer can not guarantee that.
-Adobe Photoshop CC 2019 (version 20) or later
-Adobe Lightroom Classic version 10.0 or later
-Adobe Premiere Pro 2022 or later
-Adobe After Effects 2021 or later
Here you see that each Adobe product is marked with different early version requirement. Premiere Pro should be 1 year old vs Photoshop version can date back to 2019. Notice that the plugin works on Lightroom’s desktop version which is why the manual specified as lightroom classic.
Any current version of Affinity Photo that supports loading Adobe Photoshop plugins and also, any current version of Capture One that supports external editing should work with Dehancer.
If you’re using Final Cut PRO for editing video like I do, make sure it’s 10.5.4 version or later.
Having said that, if you just don’t ever want to worry about it, keep your apps updated automatically. I’m using Creative Cloud desktop apps - Photoshop and Lightroom classic and the auto-update feature of CC helps to update my apps automatically as soon as new versions are released. Everyone has their own preference. If you want to go and check individual apps’ version, you may do so by clicking on the top left corner and spot the release information.
How to install Dehancer Plugin
Your operating system and program versions are up-to-date - now the next one is installation.
Go onto https://www.dehancer.com/#download, pick the host application, your product and Os. Let’s do this one for Final Cut Pro or Lightroom (B-ROLL or image like below). The steps are quite easy until you unzip the downloaded zip-archive. This was the only part that I spent more time than I needed to. You’ll see two separate distributives for Intel and for M1 provided with the installation package. You’ll have to choose the right one.
So, the file name contains the host application (Photoshop or Lightroom) and the compatible CPU type: Install the x86 version of the plugin for Intel-based macs or use arm64 — for Apple Silicon M1/M2. About This Mac includes Mac’s specs under the Apple icon and this is where I checked the processor info to know which file to install. Run the installation file and follow the installation steps. And bang, we now have dehancer installed and ready to operate. Thanks for sticking with me through the boring but necessary stuff here. In a few days I’ll be back with another video that gets more into the value of this plugin.
If you want to be ready for that, use the promo code LUMINOUS for a 10% discount, get it installed, and I’ll see you very soon to see what we can do with this thing. Cheers, have a bright and focused week.
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