The Natural Spirit

This week was a stretch for me. I started early in the week working an image to have prepared for this magazine edition, and up until the last minute, the finishing of the image stymied me. I could not get the affects I was looking for using most of the processing techniques I know.

In wee small hours of Sunday morning I went looking for some inspiration or help (mostly I knew what I wanted, I just couldn’t seem to achieve it) on the net, and ran across a set of filters I hadn’t seen before. They offered a 15 day trial so I signed up at Safe Harbor and downloaded the filter set.

The filter set is Dfx 2.0 for Photoshop - a set of filters that approximate the hard-camera filters supplied by Tiffen. According to the blurb on the Safe Harbor website:

The Tiffen Dfx digital filter suite is the definitive set of digital optical filters. Up to 1000 filters, including simulations of many popular award-winning Tiffen glass filters, specialized lenses, optical lab processes, film grain, exacting color correction plus natural light and photographic effects–are now in a controlled digital environment with either 8 or 16 bits per channel processing.

I installed the set in Photoshop CS3, loaded up my image and had a look at the filters.  Almost immediately I found exactly what I was looking for to complete the image. Eureka!

The most useful of the filters for me is the light effects. They have a set of filters for gobo effects (along with a lot of other lighting effects)…that’s where you apply a covering to a studio light that has shaped holes cut into it (it can be as simple as black cardstock with cut out shapes). The light is trained on  your backdrop, and the light coming through shows on your subject (or backdrop) in those shapes…like stars or hearts or whatever shape you have.

The cutouts contained in this filter set are numerous…I spent a good deal of time looking through them and discovered I was rather entranced by this one filter alone. Within the light effects filters are many other options besides the gobo set - there are a number of star filters and a number of different lights to add warmth (gold filters) or cooling (silver filters) to your images. The entire lighting set (quite extensive) has a large variety of pre-sets, but also offers the ability for the user to change the parameters to achieve your own effects.

I wandered through some of the other extensive offerings in the DFX 2  filter set and decided to try one other - an x-ray filter. In other filters I’ve seen using a “faux” x-ray technique, the resulting image is an obvious filter or simply an inversion of the image, so I wasn’t hopeful, but the result stunned me.

Given that I have only used this filter set on two images, I can’t offer a full review but at this point, I am thinking this might be one of “must haves” for me. There aren’t a lot of filters that I would pay to have, mainly because I have a number of effects done using my own PS techniques saved either in layer files or in psd files. When I need one I simply open the layer or psd and grab it. What I can see from this set is that although it is designed primarily for photographic images and photographers in general, it will definitely have some terrific uses for collage-style work and for photo-manipulations…possibly even in digital paint images.

I have 14 days to trial the product properly, which I hope to have time to do. During that time I’ll make a final decision on whether or not the prohibitive cost is something I can justify for my work. It makes quick work of some things, and when a photographer is in a hurry to add special lighting to wedding photos or portraits, it could be a huge time-saver (maybe even a life-saver). At a cost of $279.00 this set is not something everyone will be able to purchase.

The images:

This is the starting photograph - a quick snap of a bridesmaid waiting to get her dress on.

Bridesmaid Waiting to Dress

The final image had a fair bit of my own processing prior to the final application of the DFX light

Agony and Indecision

effects filter, but the lighting here (if you look closely there is a face covered by a pair of hands to the right of the girl) was what completed the image. Since I was down to the wire for publication, I haven’t been able to re-work the image - which is my intent. I added the wings in a fit of frenzy looking for the effect I wanted. The wings, in my opinion add nothing to the image, so it will be reworked without them, sometime this week.

The second image using the x-ray filter started out as nothing more than a simple snapshot taken in a park - some red engelmann’s ivy climbing the trunk of a tree, with a forested area in the background. Just an ordinary image with nothing much going for it, until the application of the x-ray filter in DFX 2.

From this:

Climber

To this, in with the push of a button.

The Natural Spirit