DxO FilmPack 8 verdict
Summary
DxO FilmPack 8 sets out to replicate the look of classic analog films and processes with true scientific and historical accuracy. Does it succeed? Yes, but while its rendering are faithful and evocative, the absence of local adjustment tools can give you some workflow headaches and it lacks the madness/genius of Nik Analog Efex.
DxO FilmPack 8 works as a standalone application and as a plug-in or external editor for other programs. If you also use DxO PhotoLab, installing FilmPack 8 integrates it with PhotoLab’s editing tools, so you get the extended ‘analog’ options of FilmPack within the non-destructive workflow of PhotoLab. Nice!
DxO gives us lots of ways to create the look and feel of analog images, and DxO FilmPack 8 is not the only option. If you invest in the DxO Nik Collection, the choices widen considerably, with all the analog mayhem/magic of Analog Efex, the depth and power of Silver Efex and the endless processing permutations of Color Efex.
So let’s look at what FilmPack 8 does, and its appeal for photographers hoping to recreate the images and the emotions of yesteryear. And it offers a range of routes into these bygone eras.
On a basic level, it offers the now customary pairing of preset effects and manual adjustments. You can start from a preset – these are helpfully arranged into categories with a filtering tool to help isolate color or black and white presets, for example – and then switch to the Customize tab to see what settings the preset applied and maybe tweak them to your taste. Or you could go straight to the Customize tab and build your analog looks from scratch.
You have a variety of tools for doing this, with panels for Film Rendering, Development (basic adjustments), Graphical Effects (frames, textures, light leaks) and Lens Effects (filters, creative vignetting, blur).
There’s even a Film scan optimiser panel, so that if you are actually working with film and not digital images, you can invert negative scans into positives and correct color shifts from the orange masking applied to color negatives.
Perhaps the biggest selling points, though, are FilmPack 8’s Time Machine mode and its new Time Warp mode.
Time Machine walks you back through the history of photography, showing you landmark images and processing presets to replicate the look of each era. It’s like reading a lavishly-illustrated book that’s absorbing enough to make you forget that you’re actually here to edit some images.
The new Time Warp feature takes your image and walks you back in time to different eras and ‘looks’ for you photo. It’s kind of like the Time Machine but in reverse, with a draggable ‘ageifying’ gadget. It’s quite cool, but perhaps more of a novelty than a workflow aid.
Back to FilmPack 8’s tools. These are very effective – no question – but with no real local adjustment options it does mean you’ve got to think carefully about where FilmPack fits into your workflow.
You can use it as a standalone program and, unlike DxO ViewPoint, it can process and correct RAW files (which makes it all the stranger that ViewPoint can’t). But its lack of local adjustment tools means it will probably fit into your workflow better as a final stage after you’ve done this kind of editing in Lightroom or Capture One, say.
For myself, I think I’d rather turn to the Nik Collection for my analog looks and for a number of reasons. FilmPack 8’s lack of control points, control lines and other local masking tools kind of kills it for me – it does come with luminance masks, which is a workaround of a sort, but it does not have the masking tools you get in DxO PhotoLab and the Nik Collection.
