special (SPEctral Characterization of directly ImAged Low-mass companions) characterizes low-mass (M, L, T) dwarfs down to giant planets at optical/IR wavelengths. It can also be used more generally to characterize any type of object with a measured spectrum, provided a relevant input model grid, regardless of the observational method used to obtain the spectrum (direct imaging or not) and regardless of the format of the spectra (multi-band photometry, low-resolution or medium-resolution spectrum, or a combination thereof). It analyzes measured spectra, calculating the spectral correlation between channels of an IFS datacube and empirical spectral indices for MLT-dwarfs. It fits input spectra to either photo-/atmospheric model grids or a blackbody model, including additional parameters such as (extra) black body component(s), extinction and total-to-selective extinction ratio, and can use emcee (ascl:1303.002), nestle (ascl:2103.022), or UltraNest (ascl:1611.001) samplers infer posterior distributions on spectral model parameters in a Bayesian framework, among other tasks.