Digital Film Tools

Digital Film Tools’ 55mm plug-in filters for Adobe Photoshop:

more than your ordinary plug-in variety pack

by Bob Singer , MNEC

OVERVIEW

When we first heard about 55mm filters, a plug-in filter set from Digital Film Tools for Adobe Photoshop, our gut reaction was “oh, no! Not another set of digital equivalents for glass photo and video filters.”

Well, “me, too” filters they’re not. To the contrary, 55mm filters are professional quality plug-ins that are “must haves”. (Digital Film Tools is an offshoot of L.A.-based visual effects studio Digital FilmWorks whose work includes hundreds of feature films, commercials and TV shows. Many of these filters were developed in-house specifically for that work.)

All of the 55mm filters can process in either 8 or 16 bit Photoshop modes. Once you’ve tried the downloadable demos and have convinced yourself that you need this plug-in set, you can purchase it directly from Digital Film Tools for $195 (or bundled for $225 with the company’s normally priced $50 Digital Film Lab plug-in of 135 different film-look presets, a savings of $20) at www.digitalfilmtools.com . Pricing is in line with that of other quality plug-in filter sets on the market.

So that we don’t run to hundreds of pages (which would be easy to do with this set in all of its available versions), we’ll restrict our review comments to 55mm filters for Adobe Photoshop; but keep in mind that 55mm filters are also available in versions for Adobe After Effects, Apple Final Cut Pro, Avid Editing Systems and Discreet Flint, Fire, Inferno, Smoke and Fire Systems. All of these versions are available for both PC and MAC. There’s one not-so-terrible limitation to note: the Photoshop version, which does support Actions, operates in the RGB color space. (System requirements and applicable Photoshop or other plug-in compatible editing program versions for 55mm are listed at the end of this review.)

According to the company, the set of 55mm filters is the digital equivalent of “many popular glass camera filters, “specialized lenses, optical lab processes, film grain, color correction, natural light and photographic effects with either 8 or 16 bits per channel processing capability.” But, don’t let that mislead you. While equivalent filter types may also be found in plug-in sets from other vendors, many of the ones in Digital Film Tools’ package are unique.

Use of each filter is intuitive and the results are easy to see in Preview as you move the sliders left and right. A downloadable and very thorough manual in PDF format is available at no charge from the company’s Web site www.digitalfilmtools.com .

To get a better idea of how easy it is to use the plug-in filters in this set and see how they work, we randomly selected three to examine more closely: Color Temperature, Day for Night and Bicolor (graduated). Let’s look at each of these one at a time.

The first one we’ll try is temperature, a quick way to warm or cool the look of a shot. This filter is comparable to using an 81 or 82 filter with a film camera. I take that back; it’s better because it makes available in only one filter the full range of Kelvin temperature adjustments. The below screen shot was taken at midday. What we really wanted, though, was a warmer image that looked more like sunset with its signature “golden light.” The temperature filter in 55mmFilters makes this easy. By moving the Kelvin slider to a lower temperature, we can reproduce the warmer light of a setting sun, as the inset image in the screen shot shows. Two additional sliders adjust Cyan/Magenta shift and Brightness. Don’t miss the four option buttons just above the sliders. With them, you can choose to alter the master image or, alternatively, just the midtones, shadows, or highlights. You’ll find similar buttons on many of the other 55mm Filters.

The 55mm Day-for-Night filter replicates well the special effect of the professional-series filter used by Hollywood movie makers to emulate moonlit evening or night scenes during daytime filming. In many ways, it even surpasses its glass equivalent because the special effect can be adjusted with buttons and sliders. The three buttons at top let you switch controls between Diffusion, Color Correct and Moonlight, each doing what its name suggests.

The human eye records scenes viewed at night or in the late evening as mildly diffused, so you can control the degree of horizontal and vertical diffusion with the sliders that appear when the Diffusion button is clicked. Even easier, hit the “ganged” diffusion button and change horizontal and vertical together.

Want an otherworldly look? Click the color correct button and you can change the normal color of post-sunset light from deep blue to yellow, green, red or what ever other spectrum color you elect. Here, you’ll find five sliders that let you change Hue , Saturation Brightness, Contrast and Gamma in any combination. Not happy? Just hit Reset (an option found for every filter’s sets of sliders) and you’re back to where you began.

The third button brings you the look of Moonlight and here, too, you can change your colors to just about anything in the spectrum. And you can also control the degree of Opacity and protect your Highlights. In short, if you wanted to achieve a steamy day’s pre-sunset feel rather than the deep blue post-sunset look, you could do that here, too. Still, with Day-for-Night, my personal preference is for the Day-for-Night preset itself, a filter that yields exactly the look of its Hollywood-used professional glass equivalent.

The Dual Tint filter reproduces the effect of using two color graduated filters with one upside down in the holder, allowing two different tints to be applied to a “color deprived” picture (see the inset image above to see what the original looked like before this filter was applied). Again, the sliders here allow you to control the strength of the tint (opacity) and the image highlights. A third slider (Grad) lets you control the direction of the effect (top to bottom, bottom to top, left to right or right to left). But don’t miss the “handles” on the preview image itself (the little squares you see above). By grabbing each one with your mouse, you can move up or down or angle the point where the two tints converge, as I’ve done here in the scenic example.

55mm Filters, as diverse as they are, also offer the ability to apply effects selectively in an image. Selections are made with what Digital Film Tools calls “advanced image slicing algorithms.” In the following shot, I’ve used Saturation to more clearly define areas where I might want to make selective changes. Compare the filter control screen’s “preview” image which is based upon Saturation selection to the original image under the filter control screen.

In this filter control screen’s upper right corner, do you see the “Extract On” box? This is where you can choose the best method for making your selection. You can choose from luminance, hue, saturation, average, red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, or yellow as the basis for your selection. Again, in the first following screen shot, I’ve chosen Saturation as my selection method and that’s what shows in the preview window.

However, in the second following screen shot, I’ve instead chosen Luminance and clipped the white. Look at the difference in the Selection filter’s preview screen’s image.

Because selective application of filter effects can often be an important consideration in speeding my workflow and the workflow of many other photographers I know, I would love to see Digital Film Tools further develop and enhance the ease of use of 55mm’s selective application.

Capabilities are where the rubber meets the road in a product review, but user control of those capabilities should be an equally important factor in assigning a product rating . 55mm is a diversified filter set that is essentially intuitive to use, yet offers user controls not often found in other plug-ins. Here are just a few of them that you’ll find:

Chooses what to view in the 55mm Preview window. Choices change depending on the filter.

Horizontal Blur: The image is blurred by a fast, quality blur along the X-axis.

Gang: Horizontal and vertical slider values ganged together. The horizontal slider affects both values.

DVE: Transform your image using Position, Scale, Rotation, Corner Pin, Shear and Crop controls.

Anchor X defines the point on the X axis where the image can be positioned, rotated, scaled or sheared.

Anchor Y defines the point on the Y axis where the image can be positioned, rotated, scaled or sheared.

In some 55mm filters, a selection is generated to create the desired effect. The Selection controls consist of Position, Range and Blur parameters, and they work the same in all of the filters. The white areas of the selection are the areas that will be affected by the filter, while the black areas remain unaffected. The selection is extracted based on luminance, in most cases, and is created using the Position and Range parameters.

A Force 16-bit processing function allows you to process in 16 bit even if your source images are 8-bit. 16-bit processing takes longer to render, but will remove banding artifacts associated with 8 bit processing.

With it’s intuitive interface, a deep list of filters and high quality output, we highly recommend 55mm and Digital Film Lab.