Re: Digital Film Tools Film Stocks 3.0.1.3 Win
Carmel Kittell
Digital Film Tools brings together the unbeatable combination of superior software designers, motion picture visual effects veterans, video editors and photographers. Add three Emmy Awards and experience in creating visual effects for hundreds of feature films, commercials and television shows and you have a recipe for success. The understanding of photography, film and video editing, and in particular visual effects, allows us to design productive and highly specialized software. Software that is useful as well as easy to use. Our products stand up to the rigors of production and are the culmination of many years of experience.
DFT
DFT (aka Digital Film Tools) is the definitive digital toolbox meant to simulate optical camera filters, specialized lenses, film stocks and grain, lens flares, optical lab processes, color correction, keying, and compositing as well as natural light and photographic effects.
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Digital Film Tools has won three Emmy Awards for its expertise in special effects in feature films, commercials and television shows but what its Film Stocks plug-in really wants to do is make your images winners.
We've had occasion to chat with President Marco Paolini at trade shows, getting demos on the company's inriguing products and making ourselves a note to review some of them. And we did recently review its iPad app Tiffen Photo fx Ultra, which we thoroughly enjoyed.
We've recently fallen in love with taking Micro Four-Thirds digital images with our old (30 years old) film lenses. And our latest crush is shooting with our venerable Vivitar Series I 70-210mm macro zoom mounted to on an Olympus E-PL1 micro 4/3 digicam using a Lensbaby Tilt Transformer.
We bought our Series I on the recommendation of a photo journalist we greatly respected. And we bought it not long after we acquired our first SLR body. Our first zoom lens, it was all about the optical quality.
The serial number tells us it's Version 1 of the lens, manufactured for Vivitar by Kiron in January 1981. Version 1 featured a 67mm filter thread, 1:2.2 maximum magnification ratio and a lens construction of 15 elements in 10 groups. It was the heaviest of the five versions at 879g.
First, the telephoto range is spectacular. The 2x crop factor of the E-PL1 means we're shooting with a 140-420mm zoom. And just to make the package sweeter, the E-PL1 has body-based image stabilization, so the Nikon-mount Vivitar enjoys something it never had on any of our Nikon bodies, film or digital.
Second, the Vivitar is a macro lens, too, focusing almost right to the front element or a few feet away, depending on the zoom barrel's position. So we can get some very intimate shots. Which are, again, aided by image stabilization.
The Tilt Transformer fits the Nikon-mount lens to the E-PL1 body. But it also tilts, shifting focus. For the most part, we leave it tightened down in the straight-ahead position, which does not shift focus. But focus is another option to consider with this arrangement.
We set the E-PL1 to Aperture Priority mode, let it meter the scene and set the shutter speed and focus on, well, focusing. The Vivitar doesn't automatically focus and it can be difficult to judge manual focus. Fortunately, there is no optical viewfinder on the E-PL1 to confuse us. We see what we're getting on the LCD or the EVF, depending on the situation. And the E-PL1 magnifies any part of the scene you point it to, which is a real aid in macro work.
We shot the America's Cup World Series with this setup, relying on its telephoto reach. And we tapped into macro mode to shoot some flowers that were posing around here recently (one of which we've used for this review).
One reason that thought occurred to us was because we'd reviewed DxO's FilmPack 3, a collection of 60 emulsion renderings devised from film emulsion processed in Paris and New York labs. It's an impressive package.
And, as we noted above, Alien Skin's Exposure 4 also emulates films and historical processes. It even goes so far as to add dust and simulate other physical defects. Which was just a bit too far for this job.
DFT provides an interesting option, though, in Film Stocks, which simulates 288 still photographic film stocks, motion picture films stocks and historical photographic processes. And unlike the other products, these filters work on both stills and video, although video requires a more expensive license.
With so many options, we probably shouldn't have been disappointed that the installer only looked in each application's plug-in folder rather than ask us to point to the system-wide plug-in folder we use.
A system-wide plug-in folder makes it easy not only to share plug-ins efficiently between applications but it also eases the pain of updating a major application. You don't really want to have to install all your plug-ins again. With an independent folder, you just point the new installation to it and you're done (assuming the plug-ins remain compatible).
- 288 analog photographic film presetsSelect from Agfa, Fuji, Ilford, Kodak, Polaroid and Rollei color and black and white film stocksChoose from a wide range of historical photographic processesGet the skewed color look of cross processingApply Lo-Fi photographic looks from Lomo and Holga toy camerasAge your images with the looks of faded filmsCreate your own film stock presetsLayering system for multiple film stock application (photo plug-in version only)Sophisticated but easy to use masking tools (photo plug-in version only)Add a vignette to any presetModify images with presets or slidersQuickly search for presets8/16 bit image processingMulti-processor accelerationOne Film Stocks photo plug-in license will allow it to run in Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop Elements, Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and Apple Aperture if installed on the same machine.One Film Stocks video/film plug-in license will allow it to run in Adobe After Effects, Adobe Premiere Pro, Apple Final Cut Pro (including FCPX), Apple Motion 5 and Avid Editing Systems if installed on the same machine.
To apply a look to the image, you start with the Filters window below the image, which contains 11 categories of filters: Black & White, Black & White Lo-Fi, Color Films: Cross Processing, Color Films: Polaroid, Color Films: Print and Color Films: Slide, Faded, Historical, Lo-Fi, Lo-Fi Cross Processing. Each option is illustrated with a representative rendering of your thumbnail.
Once you've selected a category, the Presets pane populates itself with thumbnails of your image in renderings that show each preset's effect. There's a Search field to narrow the options down as well as a popup menu to select All of them or Favorites or Custom selections. In addition, there are Toggle Favorite and Delete Preset buttons to manage the set.
But in the old days, starting with an emulsion wasn't the end of the print. If you did your own enlargement (largely black and white), you went into the darkroom (usually the bathroom), made a contact sheet, picked an image to work on and (you are here) made some magic.
Masks. With Film Stocks that's also where the fun begins. You can take that emulsion effect on a wild ride. And you can start that ride with Film Stocks' masking options, which appear when you click the Add Mask button in the Toolbar.
We were not just impressed but amazed by the masking options. DFT sells them separately if you want to use them outside Film Stocks, but there they are in the plug-in for you to tap into. Four of them: EZ Mask, Gradient, Paint and Spot.
The first one we tried was EZ Mask. A button sets the paint tool to indicate what you want to have affected and another what you want to exclude. DFT recommends starting with the first, which paints broad green strokes, and drawing an inner outline around the object you want to extract. Then you can use the other tool to show what to exclude.
The Gradient Mask tool is even simpler. The gradient determines how much of the affect is applied to the original image and you can move the control points to change the direction and size of the gradient.
The first is being able to tag a preset as a Favorite so you can sort it separately in the Presets windows. All you have to do is click the little star icon to toggle a preset as a Favorite. To sort by Favorites, just popup the Presets menu and select Favorites. Done.
Compare. One thing that was never easy to do in the darkroom was compare images. You had to make the prints, losing all your settings from the first print to make the second, before you could see what the difference might be.
Film Stocks lets you compare treatments side by side or even with a vertical or horizontal split (which treats half the image one way and half the other). You can even move the split line if halves isn't helpful. It's one of those very nice touches that shows you DFT has been around this block before you have.
We're frankly not sure what to make of this but running the same image through both DxO FilmPack 3 and Film Stocks 1.0 using both the Kodak Tri-X 400 and the Kodachrome 25 without any adjustments produced quite different images.
Using the Tri-X 400 filter, FilmPack produced an image with more contrast than Film Stocks, although the two images were quite similar. A 100 percent view shows more grain in the FilmPack image than the Film Stocks image.
With the Kodachrome 25 filter, the FilmPack image was further from the original than the Film Stocks image, with a substantial change to saturation. Film Stocks seemed to leave that alone. The FilmPack image also showed more contrast in the reds than the Film Stocks image.
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