Tiffen Dfx Essentials Creative Digital Effects Software by Tiffen
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Digital camera reviews of Tiffen Dfx Essentials Creative Digital Effects Software
Digital camera Review: Good at some specific things, but clunky user interface
Summary: 3 Stars
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Note: This review is for the Mac version of the Tiffen Dfc Essentials product. I am an avid novice photographer and I shoot a Canon 40D, using Aperture for most of my post-capture photo refinement. I shoot about 200 to 600 photos a week, and manage them all in an Aperture catalog, which stores all the EXIF and other meta data as well.
I do not use Photoshop or other "heavy duty" image editing applications, so I was hopeful that Dfx Essentials would be a nice addition to my basic Aperture workflow. If it was offered as a set of Aperture plug-ins, I think that the Tiffen Dfx Essentials tools would rate four or five stars. The filters and effects are extremely flexible and can easily achieve some very nice effects that are either not possible or much more difficult with Aperture. Some of the effects are just plain goofy, but for the most part the filters work very well and are very useful for portrait and still life photography (e.g. blurring, halos, highlighting, color enhancements, b&w effects and filters, etc.)
However, the Mac version of the application suffers from a very poorly designed user interface in my opinion. I'm not sure what the engineers were thinking, but they may have been trying to emulate the Mac experience without ever having actually used a Mac before. The colors are dark gray, and the file browsing menus are a weird cross between Windows and Mac, but are more confusing than either.
This interface causes the workflow to be much more difficult that it should be, in my opinion. For example, to edit an image in Tiffen Dfx that you are looking at in Aperture (my starting point for workflow), I have to save off a version of the file somewhere easy to find (like in a folder on my desktop) and then open Dfx up, use the terrible file browser to find and select the image (which must be done by memorizing the file name because it lacks thumbnail images), and then conduct the editing in Dfx. Once the image is finalized in Dfx, it must be imported BACK into Aperture as a separate file from the original master (thereby breaking the association to the original file).
After a couple of weeks of using Dfx, I found this process to be more of a hassle than I was willing to deal with for all but the most specific types of projects which Dfx does particularly well (like black & white effects and blurring backgrounds)
Overall, I believe it is a nice tool for those "special" photos that you want to retouch before having them printed, but the clumsy user interface (on a Mac) make it just too unpleasant to use frequently.
Digital camera Review: Great and Inxpensive Photo Editing Tool
Summary: 5 Stars
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Tiffen's DFX Essentials offers a tremendous value for new photographers who are beginning to take their work seriously.
For years I've been using a combination of Photoshop and custom action sets that have cost me well over $1,000 for just the software alone. This toolset does much of the same color correction tasks at a fraction of the cost.
Previews are fast and it allows for nesting filtered effects together. This is an excellent way to learn about color correction and how to bring out a visual 'punch' that you can't get straight out of your camera. I'd go so far as to say it's an essential product to buy along with a digital SLR.
On the Mac it seems to support any camera RAW format that OSX supports. I was able to open RAW files from my Nikon D300 easily.
The only negative here is that the software is standalone and does not offer a plugin for Photoshop, Aperture or iPhoto. Those options are available with Tiffen's more expensive products.
The bottom line: A must have for budding amateur photographers new to digital SLR photography.
Digital camera Review: May be of limited usefulness for most amateur photographers
Summary: 3 Stars
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Installation:
The program installed without a hitch on a Windows XP desktop; as the license allows installation on a 'back-up' computer, I also installed it on my Windows Vista laptop. Installation with Windows Vista was not as trouble-free. Once the disc is inserted, a window launches automatically and gives the option of watching a tutorial or specifying Windows or Mac installation - on XP the "Windows install" worked well and the installation proceeded. On the Vista machine, the link never worked. I had to go to "my computer", look through the disc, find the install and double-click it. OK, so not flawless, but not the end of the world, either, and it installed easily after that.
Using the Software:
Now for the software itself - the tutorial makes it easy to be up and running in a short period of time. The design is intuitive and controls easy to figure out. The filter options offered are numerous. There are seven categories of filter types (film lab, HFX Diffusion, HFX Grads/Tints, Image, Lens, Lights and Special Effects) Within each of those categories, there are anywhere from four to eight variations on that particular theme and then there are several available "levels" or presets for each of these. Here's an example: suppose you want to do a gradient effect (this takes a color and superimposes it over your picture in a gradient effect that adds more intense color at the top of the picture, with the effect lessening as it progresses down). You would first open the picture, then select HFX/Grad Tints from the sliding menu bar below the picture, then choose the type of tints/gradient (in this example: gradient), then choose the "level" and type of gradient. This choice has more selections than most - you choose the color and the intensity and there are over 70 combinations to choose from. The effect can be fun to watch and the inclination is to sit a play with this software when you first get it installed. For someone doing a lot of portraits, the softening effects may be just the thing, the vignetting makes pictures of young children charming and some of the special effects are just plain fun...try "x-ray" and you'll see what I mean.
Cost-Benefit:
I like this software and I've had some fun playing with pictures and the effects, so why only three stars? Cost-benefit ratio. Is it really worth it to me to spend $60 to be able to get a cranberry gradient on a picture of leaves? Sure, it looks artsy, but what am I going to do with this? For folks out there who are doing the artsy thing with their digital pics and doing it seriously (as in hanging in galleries kind of seriously), they're likely to have more powerful and sophisticated software tools at hand. For us amateur photogs, there are only so many prints you're likely to want to "doctor" up in these artsy kinds of ways. The folks who may find this worthwhile are those who want to do a lot of portrait shots and want to use the softening/haze filter and possibly the vignetting. If you look at it that way, the software costs about the same as a just one softening/haze/duto filter for your camera, so you may find it worthwhile if that's a purchase you're considering. Also, for those of you who want the look of "old pictures", there are some nice possibilities under that heading and you can end up with portrait shots that look like something from the forties. I especially like the "silver gelatin" setting.
Bottom Line:
Only you can decide if spending the money for this software will be worth it to you...think about what kind of pictures you take, what uses you put them to once taken (do you just load them on your computer and then look at them occasionally or do you have tons of them printed out and photo frames adorning every flat surface in your home?), how much time you want to spend "doctoring" your images and whether the kind of effects this software can achieve are likely to be the ones you will want to do. If you're seriously thinking about getting a haze/diffusion filter, the cost may be justified and it may be easier for you to manipulate the image digitally than to put on and take off a filter as you're using your camera. You may also have a point-and-shoot that can't take filters that are readily available for digital SLRs.
Digital camera Review: Not for me.
Summary: 3 Stars
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
When I look at a digital picture, I try to figure out how to make it better. The DFX software seems to be designed to make it _different_. You can do some touchup and color correction, but the main focus is on extreme effects.
My main gripe, though, comes from the fact that I am detail-oriented. The work pane in the center of the screen just gives you a tiny, tiny peek at your picture. Sure you can zoom, but then you just get a tiny slice to work with, and switching between the pan tool and other tools in the Paint mode is a bit of a pain.
Also, and I will admit that this is a result of not using the program as it was designed, when you leave the paint mode for another effect without creating a new layer, you lose the changes you just made and there is no prompt from the program to alert you to this. Yes, you can undo back to where you were, but if you don't notice the loss until you've done other things, you have to choose which things will be gone forever. The way the program is designed, you have to create a new layer every time you go from one effect to another (and Paint mode is an "effect"). This is a bit counter-intuitive, and a simple warning that you're about to discard your changes would be helpful, at least for a new user.
The clone tool is a bit bizarre and cumbersome. It works OK, but I had to find the instructions on how to use it, and I've been using paint-type programs for a long, long time.
There is no selection tool, so every effect you choose is applied to the entire picture. As a result, I cannot imagine any situation in which the Depth of Field and Split Field effects (to name two) would be useful. I know this is just supposed to be a stripped-down version of their more expensive software, but there is a difference between lite and useless. And some effects are just silly: "X-Ray" is just a negative image.
On the other hand, the convert-to-black-and-white effects have some good presets, with different weighting for different colors. In the right circumstances that could be useful since it gives noticeably different results than would a simple convert-to-grayscale function.
Another reviewer complained that the interface was not completely Mac-like. It's not 100% Windows-like, either. But the biggest mistake in the interface is the too-subtle indications of which buttons are currently in effect.
I've been improving and restoring photos with Paint Shop Pro for a long time. While I could achieve a few of the same tasks with DFX Essentials, I would not want to try to use it full time, for the reasons I've listed. It's probably OK for goofing around with pictures, but I don't see the point to that.
Digital camera Review: Not really worth it
Summary: 3 Stars
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
This is a second tier effects package that quickly makes you wish you had sprung for the full set instead. The effects are ok, but overall its as if all the "good" stuff was left to the expensive version and the second rate effects dropped here. As a budget package its still rather expensive, there are better deals to be found.