I’ve been reviewing Tiffen Filters for many years, so naturally I was excited when they came out with a digital version of their filters that could be used in post.
I found the DFX v4 much simpler to add a filter in post instead of having to purchase several strengths of the ProMist, ProMist Black, GlimmerGlass, etc…
When adding effects to shots, cinematographers usually use glass filters, causing the effect to be baked into the image and can’t be changed later.
DFX v4 has a useful interface that lets you quickly go through the different levels of the filters until you find one that you like. Once you settle on a particular filter, there are tools to help you tweak it into perfection.
Here is a brief look into some of my stand out filters:
In addition to a variety of different pre-made borders, the Borders filter let’s you create your own using size, softness, and color controls.
Color Shadow uses multiple color’s that you select. By mixing a little of it in with your original you can make a white image in the lights and mid tones, with the darker parts showing up as a multi colored gradient. It’s great for making a show’s opening sequence.
The Detail filter has five presets for performing selective sharpening, detail enhancement, and five presets for edge aware smoothing. If your lens wasn’t sharp enough, this filter can help.
Develop is great for when you have an image that needs help. The temperature, tint, exposure, recovery, fill light, blacks, brightness, contrast, vibrance, saturation, and mix controls give you all the tools you need in one place for adjusting the color and tonal scale of your images.
Grunge adds film dirt, hair, scratches, stains, splotches, vignetting and grain as well as gate weave and flicker to make your pristine image look like damaged film. It’s not something we haven’t seen before, but they’ve done a nice job.
The Harris Shutter plugin seemed like a good way to add a red, green, and blue image to your shot. If your actor was thinking about a woman, you could add slo-mo footage in red of them kissing etc…Or, if he’s walking down a busy city street at night you could add in colored footage of what he’s seeing as he walks. That’s not what is was designed to do, but I tend to think outside the box.
Radial Tint uses 4 multi-color, radially graduated filters to tint the image. I like that they are movable. It would be handy for a music video.
The Satin® and Black Satin® filters are designed to enhance the natural beauty of talent with minimal signs of filtration. Satin® gently adds a minimal flare to highlights and reduces contrast while suppressing facial blemishes and wrinkles.
The Black Satin® offers all the benefits of the Satin® filter in a more subtle form. This filter gently controls highlights, reduces contrast and adds a grittier look than regular satin filters, while suppressing facial blemishes and wrinkles. This filter has a lot of very handy tools included and is like the Develop filter, with a softness filter added.
The Flag filter lets you dim down a “Practical” light that might be in the shot. This filter could really save you if you didn’t have the time to use a dimmer or ND on the light at the time of shooting.
Tone Adjust is an amazing filter that approximates the appearance of high dynamic range images by adjusting the tonal values. Detail is recovered from the darker portions of the images and can optionally be de-noised. This filter can add pop to a dull image very quickly.
A lot of changes have been made to the Video, Photo, and Standalone Plug-ins. check out all of the new features at http://tiffen.com/tiffen-dfx/.
DFX v4 was tested on my Thunderbolt “Review” system which is:
A new Mac Pro 6 core with two D700 cards running Mavericks OSX, Adobe CC, FCPX, and DaVinci Resolve, 64GB of OWC RAM, an Avid Color panel, OWC Blu-ray, Rocketstor 5212, Logic Keyboard for FCPX, two High Point Rocketstor 6328 Thunderbolt RAID controllers connected to four G-SPEED esPro RAID cases, a Black Magic Ultra Studio 4K interface with video output viewed a Boland 32” broadcast monitor. Audio is a Mackie 1402-VLZ and Genelec studio monitors. More information can be found at www.dhpvideo.com.