Expand tool provides a separate manual control for black and white points in relation to the output color space.
All films naturally have different contrast, different black and white points. At the sampling stage, we avoid digital correction to preserve the individual features of the films, which ensures a fair and convincing simulation. Thus, film profiles in Dehancer, without additional adjustment, usually lack contrast, but at the same time they have a lot of headroom for creative adjustments.
💡 We recommend adjusting Expand immediately after a film profile selection. Set the black and white points to ‘fit’ an image into a dynamic range of your timeline color space. Clipping control is essential at this point, so keep an eye on the Waveform. During a grading session you will probably revisit this tool several times.
Color Mode
The Color Mode option can be useful if you encounter unwanted color shift or oversaturation. In the Luma mode Expand affects only the luminance component of an image, but does not affect its color, so the changes in contrast have no effect on the saturation.
💡 If your source doesn’t have enough headroom for the Expand adjustments try to enable the Analogue Range Limiter checkbox in the Print toolset which gives more ‘relaxed’ extremes. Also you can use the Film Compression tool to make the highlights more textured and smooth out the clipping.