DxO FilmPack 3 Expert (PC/Mac)

A good selection of film emulation presets can sometimes be all it takes to get an image into the territory you want. Typically, emulating a film involves adjusting the tonal response across all of the colors. You find that one brand lightens yellows while introducing contrast in the blues... another may increase overall lightness, but introduce greens in the highlights. When overused, these can become corny to the viewer, but we're not buying software to do Instagram-level work, are we?

The program presents everything nice and simply to the user. It is very easy to load your image, pick a preset, and, if you so desire, give it a few tweaks. You can, for example, select the Purple channel and tweak the hue just slightly, then de-saturate the reds. If you get something you like, you can save this as a preset to come back to later on.

There are two options, however, that I really wish were available. First off, there is a histogram viewer up top, but no way to adjust levels and/or curves within the program. It would be really nice to be able to shape the curves within the program, or pull in the highlights and shadows like the Nik suite allows. While it is certainly an option to do this adjusting before or after running the image through DxO FilmPack, sometimes you load up an image with a specific filter in mind and it takes several trips back and forth between Lightroom/Aperture and FilmPack until you have the input file tweaked the way it needs to be. This would help A LOT.

Second, I really like the options to adjust the color channels. This is something similar to the color editor in Aperture, which I use a lot when I want 2 or 3 colors in an image to really stand out, and bring down the intensity of everything else a little bit. Taken too far, this could be used for selective coloring, but... remember what I said about not being corny. Anyway, here, an eyedropper tool would be really helpful. I do like how the color options are a lot more numerous than just RGB, but sometimes the area you want to adjust isn't quite yellow and isn't quite green, and narrowing it down becomes quite tedious.

All in all, I do like DxO FilmPack. It's a comprehensive collection of filters that... whoa, it looks like they just raised the price quite a bit! That's not cool. Well, anyway, it's decent software, I just wish it was a little more hands-on. For what it's worth, though, it runs *really fast*, where Nik seems to bog down from time to time. Download the trial version, which runs for 30 days and see for yourself if it's for you.

An extra tool for my arsenal of filters and apps to find my creative niche. A must have tool for photographers!

DXO makes fine software to fix those aberrations in your photos that occur even with nice lenses. This pack gives your digital images that film look that we all miss. It works.