HAL Picture Dia Squared Introduced – Diachromie and Diaphanie in One Plugin, Shared Presets, Livegrade Support

by Johnnie BehiriToday

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HAL Picture is turning its two look development plugins into a family. At IBC 2026, we spoke to co-founder Olivier Patron and engineer Antoine about Dia Squared, a single plugin that combines Diachromie and Diaphanie behind fewer sliders, a lighter preset-only version below it, and new Pomfort Livegrade support that brings grain and halation to the on-set monitor.

HAL Picture is the image R&D brand of Polyson Post-Production, a Paris post house that handles sound and picture mastering. When we visited the team in Paris last year, the two OpenFX plugins had just been released: Diachromie builds a color look from scratch by bending and transforming colors, while Diaphanie authors texture with grain, halation, diffusion, and control over fine and coarse detail, with vignetting to follow soon. This is the company’s second IBC, and Olivier told us that after a long beta, the plugins are now widely used on feature films, at least in France.

Look development is not grading

DaVinci Resolve already offers a deep grading toolset, so we asked what was missing. Olivier answers that grading and look creation are two different gestures. Grading tools work shot to shot, dialing in exposure or balance. A look is built once per show and has to hold from the first frame to the last, across day and night scenes, SDR and HDR displays, and every delivery format.

That is why HAL Picture’s plugins only operate in scene-referred color spaces, log in and log out. A look built in Diachromie or Diaphanie can be carried to another show, shot on other cameras and finished for other deliverables, and it will come back as intended. The plugins also do not bake everything into a lookup table. The user shapes the color volume and the contrast curve directly, which is powerful but exposes a lot of parameters.

What Dia Squared changes

Dia Squared is the response to that parameter count. It merges Diachromie and Diaphanie into one plugin and hides part of the controls, while the processing underneath stays exactly the same. Presets move freely between Dia Squared and the two flagship plugins, in both directions.

Olivier described the intended handoff. The “color nerd” in a post house builds a look from A to Z in Diachromie and passes the preset on. A DP, or anyone who needs to move fast and would rather talk about the image than about color sliders, opens it in Dia Squared and adjusts it with a reduced set of controls, for example pulling back the reds a little. If the change they want is out of reach, the preset goes back to the colorist, who makes it in Diachromie and returns it.

The limit is stated plainly: a look cannot be edited as far in Dia Squared as it can in Diachromie. The point is a shared pipeline in which both tools read the same files.

Dia Squared in DaVinci Resolve

Antoine, who helped develop Dia Squared, showed it running in Resolve. With Diachromie and Diaphanie on separate nodes and then Dia Squared loading the same two presets, the image was identical. Inside the single plugin, the familiar modules remain, including the contrast and color tone curves and new preprocessing modules, and each module can load a preset of its own, so parts of different looks can be mixed.

His example started with a color preset called Soft Gold, which keeps the color palette controlled, plus a 16mm texture preset. He then went straight to the diffusion module, picked a Black Pro-Mist-style diffusion, and set its strength. Next, he swapped in a slightly crisper contrast curve and compared it to the original before committing. Finally, he used the color density control to lift the brightness of the reds. The adjusted result can be exported as a new preset and opened again in Diachromie.

Diachromie and Diaphanie themselves are also getting new versions with additional presets and new color tools.

A lighter version for applying looks

Below Dia Squared, HAL Picture is preparing a light version. It works much like Dia Squared, but it is locked: presets cannot be exchanged with the other plugins, and only the built-in HAL Picture presets that ship with it can be loaded and adjusted to a limited degree. It is also not log to log. Instead, it is display-bound, working to Rec.709 or HDR.

Olivier called it an entry point to what the company does, aimed at users who want to apply a good-looking look without altering it much.

Texture on set with Livegrade

The plugins fully support Baselight and DaVinci Resolve on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Support for Pomfort Livegrade is the new addition. Premiere Pro is not supported for now, though Antoine did not rule it out for later, and the team is thinking about Nuke without any concrete plans.

According to Antoine, Livegrade matters because there was previously no way to show HAL Picture’s texture work on set. With the Livegrade integration, grain, the spatial equalizer, halation, diffusion, and vignetting can be seen in real time on multiple outputs, so the DP can judge the final image during the shoot. For readers who want the background on that particular effect, we recently looked at why filmmakers keep coming back to halation. On the color side, looks used to reach the set as LUTs. Now the DIT can adjust the presets directly inside the DIT software.

Price and availability

Dia Squared will cost €850 as a perpetual license, and an annual subscription will also be offered. The light version will be sold as a perpetual license only, for €250. Diachromie and Diaphanie remain the flagship products, sold separately or as a bundle; at launch they were priced at €1,100 each or €1,950 for both. Olivier said the team is still adding features, with a closed beta starting in a few weeks and a release planned for this fall. For more information, please visit the HAL Picture website.

Would a simplified look plugin that shares presets with your colorist change how you prepare a shoot? Don’t hesitate to let us know in the comments below!