How to get such "soft" colors

Whenever I go to color grade real film scans I find myself getting sharper less realistic colors
how do I get soft yet vibrant colors like in these screenshots?
https://postimg.cc/gallery/vMJ81vX

The first question I would ask is what color space the film was scanned to.

If they gave you a rec709 scan, even worse in 8 bit, then you will have less flexibility. If they gave you a cineon scan in good codec, you have more options.

To me, the images you refer to are very dark, muddy, and skewed towards green/cyan, with very lifted blacks, and fleshtones pushed towards kind of a garish red:



You're free to like that image if you want, but just looking at it on scopes reveals a lot about what's going on.



I'd give a plug to my friend Stefan Ringelschwandtner and his "Reverse-Engineering the Grade" course, which goes into detail about how to use scopes and reference materials to push shots into a similar kind of look:

https://mononodes.com/course-reverse-en ... the-grade/

Pretty much what Marc said.


Of course output is relative to input. So it will depend on what you start with.

The screenshots, show what appears to be some kind of old film stock, not sure which one exactly, or how much is altered in scanning process. Looks like 70-80's Asian cinema. Not sure how it was scanned or how much underexposed it is in the original, but scanned version definitely looks a stop or around a stop underexposed. There are versus film simulation plug ins, power grades etc out there and of course you can always cook up your own. Just make sure you are emulating the good bits, not bad bits. Underexposed look is not the most flattering. You can make images dark or underexposed artistically and not make them look like they are underexposed because of technical reasons.

I wonder if the Dehancer plug-in would be a quick method of emulation?

I wonder if the Dehancer plug-in would be a quick method of emulation?

Probably it would. There is probably one of the emulation presets in Dehancer that covers the time period when film stock used on that film would have been used and since its full of other slides, one can tweak it to match.

Of course it really depends on the footage but as a starting point - this look has a similarity to Asteroid City, if you know what I mean - I do see a relatively low contrast but high saturation.
So what I would do would be to decrease the luminance contrast. You can do this with one of these methods
- un-gang the curves and decrease the contrast of only the Y curve
- decrease Y Gain and increase Y Lift
- decrease the contrast slider and set the node blend mode to Luminance
- decrease the contrast in the HDR palette
just a few ideas to get started. the overall palette is of course more complicated, but I assume what you're looking for is the low contrast with still vibrant colors

When were these films shot? Here's an interesting video about how films from the 70s and 80s were mostly shot on stocks that push green toward blue. If that's when they were shot, maybe you just don't like the look that these films naturally have.

However, there's a lot of bad color grading videos on youtube, so I don't promise this is good info. I'd be really interested on Marc's opinion on this video or anyone else who grades a lot of 70s/80s films.

Of course it really depends on the footage but as a starting point - this look has a similarity to Asteroid City, if you know what I mean

Yeah, it does have similar style, although I would imagine Asteroid City was shell we say "tweaked" in DI, where OP example was probably only scanned. Still, it could be used as good reference for something similar. Good one.

Asteroid.City.2023 (1).jpg (343.41 KiB) Viewed 1583 times

DP Robert Yeoman ASC used KODAK 35mm color/B&W film to deliver a striking result on Wes Anderson's 'Asteroid City'

https://www.kodak.com/en/motion/blog-po ... roid-city/

The Look of Asteroid City

https://www.filmmakersacademy.com/blog- ... roid-city/

I wonder if the Dehancer plug-in would be a quick method of emulation?

Probably it would. There is probably one of the emulation presets in Dehancer that covers the time period when film stock used on that film would have been used and since its full of other slides, one can tweak it to match.

To me this image feels like it was saturated digitally. Probably trying to compensate due to underexposure.

As Mark said, he's free to like this reference. But if it was me I would probably try to use the Asteroid City reference you also posted. That said, I wouldn't know how to recreate its look.

When were these films shot? Here's an interesting video about how films from the 70s and 80s were mostly shot on stocks that push green toward blue. If that's when they were shot, maybe you just don't like the look that these films naturally have.

That's not true, and I've worked on hundreds of remasters done from 1970s/1980s emulsions. Kodak 5247 was not skewed towards green. None of the stocks were. In fact, Kodak bent over backwards for decades to actually try to get their films as absolutely neutral as possible. They weren't always successful, but they did at least make the effort. The whole point was to allow the filmmakers get a print that looked remarkably similar to the colors seen by the human eye on set.

It is true that the film stocks of the 1970s and 1980s have a certain look and feel, but if I had to describe it, it's dense and noisy more than anything else. All the 100ISO stocks were tough to work with. Things got much better with the T-Grain stocks of the late 1980s, and then the Vision stocks of the 1990s. Those were a pleasure to use and looked fantastic -- arguably the perfection of film in that era. They still make the same 5219 Vision III stock today as what we had 20 years ago. [I don't dispute that "color density" is a real thing.]

The other thing that people often don't think about is that the differences in stocks don't make as much of a difference as the decisions by the cinematographer in terms of lenses, lighting, and exposure. I can show you four films all shot on the same stock (Kodak 5254) -- Godfather, Close Encounters, Jaws, and [/i]French Connection[/i] -- and they each look absolutely different. Different DPs, different lighting techniques, different labs, different lenses, different approaches... the stock doesn't make as much difference.

That's why whenever somebody asks, "hey, can we have a film emulation look on this?", I inevitably ask which one? There's a thousand film looks -- it's whatever you want it to be and whatever you think it should look like.

Oh btw you could also achieve similar results with my NOIR Filmic Contrast DCTL as shown in the demo video here at 5:20

But if you don't want to spend any money, just try the techniques I showed earlier.

PS: let me know if advertising here is forbidden, I will delete this post in case it's not tolerated here of course.

Godfather and Jaws. Two veeeery different looks.

Godfather and Jaws. Two veeeery different looks.

Very true -- the work of Gordon "Prince of Darkness" Willis, and Bill Butler, who was one of the kindest, nicest DP's ever. Both shooting 5254, both using Technicolor's NYC lab... yet the pictures couldn't be more different. And yet each wonderful, classic films in their own ways.

Oh btw you could also achieve similar results with my NOIR Filmic Contrast DCTL as shown in the demo video here at 5:20 But if you don't want to spend any money, just try the techniques I showed earlier. PS: let me know if advertising here is forbidden, I will delete this post in case it's not tolerated here of course.

I've been color-correcting film for about 45 years, so I'd say at this point, I pretty much know what film looks like. I don't need a DCTL to get there. Having said that, I am a fan of Dehancer, and I think they do a pretty good job of it. Some people prefer Filmbox, and it can also do a good job (but I personally prefer Dehancer).

There are also some terrific free tools within Resolve 19 & 20 with OFX Film Look Creator and the added OFX Film Grain Effects, which are included with Resolve Studio. The advantage of using those are, every Resolve system in the world has those built-in, and you'll never have to worry about a LUT or a DCTL not being installed. It's fantastic how there are so many terrific choices among color tools in 2025. And there are also people who just choose to do it all by hand, or have a collection of Power Grades they've built up throughout their careers.

I've been color-correcting film for about 45 years, so I'd say at this point, I pretty much know what film looks like. I don't need a DCTL to get there. Having said that, I am a fan of Dehancer, and I think they do a pretty good job of it. Some people prefer Filmbox, and it can also do a good job (but I personally prefer Dehancer).

Totally agree, you don't necessarily need third party tools for such things, which is why I recommended 4 free alternatives earlier. I just added it as another option, because why not.
Btw speaking of Dehancer. I can totally understand why you like the aesthetics this tool produces, but if you are using it regularly I'd recommend you watch my review on youtube, as it does have some technical flaws that I show in the video. Just as a heads up, so you don't run into in any problems.

I've been color-correcting film for about 45 years, so I'd say at this point, I pretty much know what film looks like. I don't need a DCTL to get there. Having said that, I am a fan of Dehancer, and I think they do a pretty good job of it. Some people prefer Filmbox, and it can also do a good job (but I personally prefer Dehancer).

Totally agree, you don't necessarily need third party tools for such things, which is why I recommended 4 free alternatives earlier. I just added it as another option, because why not.
Btw speaking of Dehancer. I can totally understand why you like the aesthetics this tool produces, but if you are using it regularly I'd recommend you watch my review on youtube, as it does have some technical flaws that I show in the video. Just as a heads up, so you don't run into in any problems.

My secret to Dehancer is I dial a lot of the effects way, way, way down. There are no technical flaws with my work -- I think we've delivered at least 40 or 50 indie features done with Dehancer in the past five years. Some have aired on Netflix and Amazon with nary a complaint.

Dehancer seems nice but I've been wary of buying it given its supposed Russian origin, that's a no-go for many of us Europeans. They seem to be obfuscating the country of origin now and it's changed several times. Perhaps there's no Russian/Belarusian connection anymore, I don't know.