Digital Media | Spotlight: Photography | Inside Aperture | Blogs
A bumper crop of plug-ins
A quick look at the new crop of plug-ins that came out at the end of last week.
First up is the Tiffen Filters plug-in. make sure you take a close look at the URL in that link.
Yes, I kid you not - they mis-spelled Aperture in the URL. Oops.
Like the physical Tiffen filters, these digital ones (previously available for Photoshop, After Effects etc.) come in many, many, many forms, and all with their own series of parameters - on the one hand this means that there’s something in there to suit every taste, but finding them can take awhile. You start off with nine categories of filters (e.g. Film Lab, Gels, Lens, Special Effects etc.), each of which then have multiple filters, each with multiple presets and sliders. This can be quite intimidating on first use.
Which brings me on to another point - the interface. It’s dark, which is no bad thing, but there’s also too little tonal variation - for example the slider thumbs (the bit of a scrolling bar that you grab to move it) are nearly the same colour as the rest of the scroller, initially making it hard to even see if there’s anything else to scroll to. It’s not a particularly bad interface (I’ve seen far worse), but coming from the carefully-designed Aperture interface with it’s strong use of tonality to divide the different working areas, the DFX interface feels decidedly clunky.
Of particular note, given it’s lack in Aperture, is the Chromatic Aberration filter found in the Lens tab, which does a reasonable job getting rid of colour haloes on the edges of wide-angle shots.
The scary bit? Pricing. After a bit of digging around, I found the price list for the various versions of the Tiffen DFX
Download price is $299, and I don’t think that’s a typo either, they charge the same for the Photoshop plug-in. In other words, it costs more than Aperture does in the first place.
Now, in case it sounds like I’m panning the product, I’ve only dipped in to this briefly, and with a background in UK large-format landscape photography I’ve never been a big user of lens filters, so it’s not something that’s really aimed at me. It's also clear from the names of many of the filters that they are designed to replicate as closely as possible the effects of real-world filters, by specific name, making it pretty easy for an art director etc. to specify the look required.
Also as an occasional developer with a strong interest in visual interface design I'm probably over-sensitive to odd interface designs.
Then there are the three new filters from DFX themselves. I hadn’t actually realised that the Tiffen plug-in is written by the same people until I launched the Light plug-in and got exactly the same dark grey dialog box about activating the trial version and then saw a near-identical interface. With the same all-dark-grey sliders, custom buttons etc...
Light looks pretty much like a stripped down version of the Tiffen plug-in, but with the addition of a series of patterns such as windows that can be superimposed in different ways. Several of the effects are identical to those in the Tiffen plug-in.
Ozone appears to be a pretty sophisticated zone-based imaging tool, allowing you to select particular tonal ranges to make adjustments to, or even colour ranges, by saturation etc. The ability to view the areas that will be affected is particularly nice, either via a little thumbnail or in the main viewer area. It'll be interesting to see how this compares with LightZone, which I suspect will end up available as an Aperture plug-in.
Last, but definitely not least, Power Stroke. Power Stroke lets you do local adjustments by painting in the areas you want to change, surrounding it with a barrier to stop the rest of the image being affected, and then making whatever changes you want to each brush-stroke area. In the long run, I can see this being by far the most useful of the DFX-produced plug-ins.
To sum up, there’s some useful stuff in these plug-ins, but personally they are more of interest for showing some more of the possibilites of the new plug-in system.
Waiting on my copy of the Plug-in SDK,
Ian
Comments (10)
I agree that the pricing of the Tiffen DFX tool is a bit much, however, I have also noticed that plug-in prices seem to be going up these days, take a look at Alien Skin Exposure and OnOne's Photo Tools Pro for Photoshop, both tools are a bit pricey. Could be that developers are finding it costlier to develop for new versions of PS and Aperture, or it could be that there is limited interest in these products, which is causing prices to go up?
In either case, I was a long time user of Digital Film Lab (the previous name for Tiffen DFX) with PS, and I was very happy with the product -- that is, until this version. I also do not like the interface (not that the previous one was better) and what always upset me was that with every new version, they would re-write their code so that you could not use your saved presets from your current version with the new version of the program -- a very big bummer, as it turned out. This current version is great in that it has many more presets included and the 'filters' are better organized and easy to find.
What disappoints me most about these (Tiffen and DFT) plug-ins is that the need to generate a 'destructive' version of the image, in order to apply their affects. With these types of 'adjustment' plug-ins, it would be far better if they could work 'non-destructively', but it could be that this is down to how Apple designed the plug-in architecture.
However, I think that it will be interesting to watch the development of the 'plug-in' market for Aperture. I would like to see the Pixel Genius crew come out with a version of their plug-ins for Aperture (however, that probably won't happen due to their seemingly cozy relationship with Adobe), and it would be great to have AS Exposure and PhotoTools built into Aperture, but only if they are non-destructive. I already own PS CS3 and many of these tools, so I don't see any rational to buy these plug-ins for Aperture, when I already have them in PS. If they were non-destructive, I might think about it.
Couple of nits to pick -- your "Power Look" link points to the DFX "Ozone" page, not their "Power Stroke" page (and the name you give the plugin is, of course, incorrect).
Personally, I tried out two of the DFX plugins (both Ozone & Power Stroke), but they didn't work for me. For starters, they would only let me run in Demo mode -- supposedly the plugins will let you get a temporary trial license, but when I tried this, I got an error code. Then too, Aperture started acting oddly with either of the plugins installed -- previews suddenly having a half or a quarter of their real estate covered in black, etc.
YMMV, but I'd recommend folks be careful with these plugins. They don't seem to be quite ready for "prime time."
Bryon - yes, they all seem to be getting more expensive recently. I think this is a result of reduced market, partly due to more widespread knowledge of how to do many of these things directly in Photoshop (the Tiffen 'pencil' feature is near-identical to the find edges command) and the rise of apps like Aperture and LightRoom and the easiness of copying adjustments from one image to another.
Like you, I'd hoped that the plug-ins would be Core Image filters and integrated into the Adjustments pane, on the other hand it would make the entry barrier to existing developers enormously higher as they would have to rewrite their image manipulation code via Core Image, AND make it efficient enough to still be usable on-the-fly - which many of the DFX filters don't manage in their own separate app...
Argos - thanks for picking up on the typo and incorrect link, now corrected. I had no problems getting a trial key or with other odd things happening, but these do look like they are still betas.
Ian
Here is a Question: are these plugins or just another mini external editor at the point that the quote plug-in make a copy and turns my 19mb file into a 79mb file that an external editor and I might as well be editing in Photoshop where the file size can be kept down with smart objects and smart filters
At this point in time, plug-ins are mini-editors in that way, but that doesn't mean it has to be a 79MB file as I believe the plug-in writer can choose the file format and bit depth for the file that is returned to Aperture.
Ian
Aperture's value as a "non-destructive" editor is compromised by each of these because they force you to essentially freeze and export a version of the raw image in order to work on it. Like others have said, as an owner of Photoshop CS3 (which, by the way, has become a bit cobwebbed since Aperture 2.1 arrived), these filters engender something of a yawn.
@ Ian re: Core Image Versions
I think DFT really missed an opportunity here by NOT making these filters Core Image compatible. Porting the existing PS filter and charging that premium of a price is a bit of a smack in the face to consumers. It seems that they are not really trying to engage Aperture users, but rather, simply trying to dredge the Aperture market to add to their customer base.
It's not a question of DFX rewriting their plug-in via Core Image (which is NOT a trivial task) - the plug-in SDK doesn't allow you to add new adjustment bricks to Aperture.
The plug-in gets a converted file or a RAW file from Aperture and hands back a converted file back to Aperture. Nothing else is possible with the SDK, as far as I can see.
Ian
P.S. What I'd like to see is companies offering a discount if you have the same plug-in for multiple apps.
I installed the Tiffen filters yesterday and was surprised at how bad the interface is.
Why doesn't the adjustment window resize? The lists on the left and right do to a point, but the image in the middle is stuck at that size -- this little stamp of an area in the middle of my 30".
When the side areas are resized, it's still not enough to enable you to read some of the filers' names, which are truncated (with ellipsis) because there isn't enough space. Huh? List view? No....
I do wish these were non-destructive, but understand why not and am okay with that.
Lastly the price: WAY TOO MUCH. In its current form, this is a $49 product. With the glaring errors fixed, maybe $99.
Teffen completely dropped the ball here. Uninstalled.
There are a lot of other plug-ins announced. Maybe you want to have a look at my overview article about all 11 announced plug-ins. Some of them are already available too:
First overview: Aperture 2.1 adjustment plugins have arrived