PhotoLab 5 and FilmPack 6! Big upgrades from DxO (2024)

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[00:00:00] DxO has just released updates to two of their apps, PhotoLab and FilmPack. Yup, FilmPack is back. DxO PhotoLab 5 and DxO FilmPack 6 both introduced some exciting new features. As in the past, DxO asked me to join them on their virtual press tour showing off the top new features to English speaking media around the world and I’d like to share those demos with you. Let’s get intoit.

[00:00:26] The first thing I want to show you are the new Control Lines, but first, I’m going to show you Control Points again. If I wanted to change the color of the water, I can simply drop a Control Point anywhere on the water. Let’s enable Masks so I can see exactly what’s being selected and from here, you can see that I’ve created a Mask to select this part of thewater.

[00:00:42] To select the rest of the water, I’ll just add additional Control Points. Three ought to do it there, giving me all the water along the beach. However, you can see that it has also selected the sky. So, I’ll knock part of that out by adding a negative Control Point up here in the sky. And just like that, we’ve created a pretty good Mask over the entire water. But now, there’s a better way, and that’s ControlLines.

[00:01:03] Let me reset this and select the new Control Line tool. The Control Line starts like a linear gradient; I simply click and drag across my scene to create a Mask that will affect this part of the scene at 100%, and this part at 0%, and then the line in between here is the gradient going from 100 to0%.

[00:01:22] However, this is a Control Line which means that the Mask on this side is going to be built based off of the chrominance and luminance of wherever I’ve selected. However, unlike a Control Point where that selection starts with the center point — which doesn’t really make sense for a Control Line — there’s a new tool; and that’s the eyedropper here. It allows me to select whatever part of the image I want to base the Mask offof.

[00:01:42] This is pretty good but it’s not perfect. We can actually refine the Mask using tools that were first introduced in the most recent Nik collection update; chrominance and luminance sliders. This will allow me to refine the Mask based off of the chrominance range and the luminance range — that’s the color and the brightness range of the area that I started my sample from. Let me showyou.

[00:02:01] To refine this, I’ll go to the Mask selectivity sliders, and then to contract the chrominance range, I drag that to the right, and you can see how the Mask is being limited to a more precise range of color, or I can expand that by dragging to the left and broaden that out. So, I’ll find a selection area that gets most of that water. I can do the same thing with the luminance; dragging to the right to constrict it, or to the left to expand it. That looks pretty goodthere.

[00:02:26] The only thing that’s missing is the sky, or rather the sky’s actually been included here and I want to knock that out. Just like with the Control Point, I have negative Control Lines as well. I’ll go ahead and drag a selection area across here and I’ll take that eyedropper, drag it up to the top onto the sky to knock that out. And now we have a really good selection of just thewater.

[00:02:45] I’ll hide the Masks and go ahead and change that. I’ll take the color temperature and drag it down to make it a little bit cooler or bluer, or I’ll drag it up to make it a bit warmer or greener. And as you can see, the water is being selected beautifully. So that’s the new ControlLines.

[00:03:00] Next, I want to show you some changes in metadata and to do this, I’m going to use both PhotoLab 5 and Lightroom Classic. I’ll load up another folder full of photos and rearrange my screen so we can see Lightroom as well and in Lightroom, under the IPTC metadata field, you’ll see that the IPTC fields are all empty. Over here in PhotoLab, we’ll see they’re all empty aswell.

[00:03:22] Both apps are pointed at the same folder of images in the Finder, meaning that both apps can read the same metadata and PhotoLab can now read and write that metadata in real time. Let me show you. First of all, I’ll show you the new preference. Under the PhotoLab preferences, under Advanced, There’s a new option to Always SynchronizeMetadata.

[00:03:42] What this means is any changes to the metadata will be read and written to the XMP file in real time. Let’s start in Lightroom. I’ll go to the Creator field and I’ll add a name — PhotoJoseph — and as soon as I do, you’ll see that the Metadata Status updates to “Has beenchanged”.

[00:03:57] Now, Lightroom doesn’t write or read the metadata in real time; you have to explicitly tell it to do that. So, I’ll go ahead and tell it now to write that metadata to the XMP file. To do that, I’ll go to the metadata menu and choose Save Metadata to File. Now, if you look over here in PhotoLab, you’ll see that the creator has been updated to PhotoJoseph. Let’s do thisagain.

[00:04:17] I’ll go back to Lightroom and under the Headline, I’ll add in Detroit Zoo. That’s where these were shot. Once again, the Metadata Status updates to “Has been changed” and this time, instead of using the menu, I’ll use the keyboard shortcut. I want you to watch over here at the IPTC Content Headline field. At the count of three, I’ll hit Command-Save. 3, 2, 1, “Command-Save”… and there it’supdated.

[00:04:38] This update actually goes both ways. I’ll go ahead and add a description here in PhotoLab. We’ll call him “Billy the Chimp”. And that metadata has immediately been updated to the XMP file. If I go back to Lightroom Classic. After a moment, we’ll see the Metadata Status change to “Changed on disk”. Now, if I go ahead and read that metadata from the file; we’ll see that description updating here aswell.

[00:05:00] If you don’t want the metadata updating in real time, you can disable that preference and then under the File menu, choose Metadata > Import, and Export, which is the same as reading and writing the metadata in Lightroom. Now, let’s move on to Keywords. I want to add a keyword to this photo. We’ll start with “Chimpanzee”. Now, let’s say I want to add some more keywords, like to explain the taxonomy of this animal. So, I’ll go ahead under Keywords and I’ll add in “Primate” and“Mammal”.

[00:05:27] Now, a chimpanzee is a primate and a primate is a mammal so it would make sense here to have these in a hierarchical structure. And I can do that! I’ll start by adding Primate into Mammal and then I’ll add Chimpanzee into Primate and just like that, I have all three of these keywords as a hierarchy. This means if I go to another photo, I can add all of those keywords at once by simply selecting the topkeyword.

[00:05:50] Now, this animal isn’t actually a chimp but it is a primate which is a mammal. So, I’ll go ahead and add another keyword. Let’s say that I don’t know what this is, so I’m just going to call him “Bob” for now, and I’ll go ahead and put Bob inside of the Primate, but then eventually, I figure out what Bob is so I can go in here and edit that and we’ll call him a “Macaque”. And there we have that keywordhierarchy.

[00:06:10] Now, let’s say that I want to share some of this metadata across more photos. I’ll go back to this image here, right click, and choose Copy Metadata. Then, I’ll go ahead and select the rest of these, right click again and under Paste Metadata, you’ll see that I have a few options. I can choose to paste all the metadata, just the keywords, just the GPS coordinates, just the author and copyright or I can choose to paste selectedmetadata.

[00:06:32] From here, I can disable whichever metadata I don’t want to paste. For example; ratings — I don’t want the same rating to get spread across all the images. I do want the same Creator field and I want the same Headline but I don’t want the same Description or the same Keywords. So, I’m left with Creator and Headline. I’ll go ahead and hit Paste and now as I look at these individual images, you’ll see that the Creator and the Headline have been updated for all ofthem.

[00:06:56] Next up is something that a lot of people have been waiting for a really long time and that’s FujiFilm support. Let me show you. These are Fuji photos, and you can see that from the metadata. Fuji X-T3 on an XF 200mm lens, along with the 1.4x Teleconverter. If I go to the Color Adjustments, you’ll see under Color Rendering, there is a category of color rendering called Digital Films, and under that “Fuji AstiaSoft”.

[00:07:21] As I drop this down, you’ll see a variety of digital film renderings that you can apply to your photos. These are meant to mimic the look of the digital film looks inside of Fuji cameras. We can also emulate Fuji film looks. I’ll go to another photo here. This one is set to a category of Color Positive Film and under here you’ll see a variety of Fuji film stocks. There’s Fuji Instax, Provia, and one of my personal favorites, FujiVelvia.

[00:07:47] Of course, just because it’s a Fuji photo, doesn’t mean that you can’t apply a Kodak or any other look to the image as well. Fuji support is technically in beta at the time of launch but as you can see, it works great. Now, let’s take a look at FilmPack6.

[00:08:01] I’m going to work on this photo here in FilmPack 6, and the first place I’m going to go is something called Time Machine. The Time Machine is a really fun way to explore different looks for your images. You’ll see this column here that has a list of eras. From the 18th century into the 1900s, the 1910s, 1920s, and soon.

[00:08:19] As you select each era, you’ll notice over here on the left, historical images from that era loading up. In each one of these, you can click on to see a larger version of that image along with a custom written explanation of the photo. These are written by a photo historian and are a great way to just learn something about the history of photography, but if you look at the bottom of this photo, you’ll see that there is a label, “Films”, and then aname.

[00:08:39] This is telling you which preset to use to mimic this look. In this case, “1921 Social”, so we’ll go back over here to the presets, scroll down and find “1921 Social”, select that and it applies that look and you can see a very similar coloring between the historical image and the photohere.

[00:08:59] Now, a big part of making a film look believable is applying a look that matches the photo. For example, if you took a photo of, let’s say a Tesla and applied a Daguerreotype look to it, that’s not going to be believable. Nobody’s going to believe that there’s a Daguerreotype of a Tesla. So, this photo here screams the 70s. Between what she’s wearing and the camper van she’s stepping out of, this looks like it could have been shot in the70s.

[00:09:22] So, I’ll go to the 70s film collection and once again over here on the lab we have a variety of historical images and I really like the look of this one here, the Concord photo. Once again, at the bottom, we have a description of it and preset names to work with — “1970 Concord” and “Concord2”.

[00:09:37] Let’s go ahead and find those presets. They’re up here at the top, and I’ll add that to it. With that preset selected, you can see that not only do the colors match but even the fading and the breaking up of the pink tones is happening here in this image just as it did on the historicalphoto.

[00:09:54] Now, if you’re not totally happy with that look, you can of course refine it. But before I show you how to refine the look, I want to show you another way to find different looks or different film presets inside a PhotoLab. I’ll go to the preset menu and filter by different presets. There’s a couple of new categories in here; Digital Films and CinematicFilms.

[00:10:12] If I go to Digital Films, you’ll see there’s a variety of Fuji digital film looks like this Fuji Classic Chrome, Classic Chrome Plus, and so on. Now, if these sound familiar, there’s a reason for that. These are the same ones that we saw in PhotoLab. I’ll bring up PhotoLab and here’s the digital film presets. These are the same ones we’re seeinghere.

[00:10:31] Now, this particular set of Digital Film presets is actually part of FilmPack, not originally part of PhotoLab, meaning that you’ll need to install FilmPack to see these presets inside a PhotoLab. Once that’s installed though, you’ll see all the common presets between both apps showing up in bothplaces.

[00:10:47] There’s another new category called Cinematic Films. Under here, we have things like this “Desaturated Green” or one of my favorites, “Teal and Orange”. Teal and orange is a pretty popular modern cinematic look and in this case, it works quite well except that the orange is a little bit strong. So, we’ll have to fixthat.

[00:11:03] The teal works out really well though with the camper van and the rug down here. So, let’s focus on fixing the orange. To do that, I’ll go into the Adjustments menu where I have full control over everything applied here. At this point, it’s important to point out that the look that you’re seeing is not a LUT. Meaning, this is not a hard-coded conversion from one look to another. It is simply a preset which means that you can dig into the adjustments and find everything that went into making this preset and refine any part of it that youwant.

[00:11:31] Now, in this case, I could go into figure out why it’s orange or I can take advantage of some of the tools that I have in here to simply counteract the orange, which is what I’ll do. I’m going to start with the Hue, Saturation and Lightness adjustments. And from here you’ll see a variety of color channels that you canadjust.

[00:11:45] So if you wanted to adjust all the reds or all the yellows or all the cyans, you can do that easily. In this case, I’ll adjust all the oranges. The orange channel and the purple channel are both new to FilmPack 6 by the way. With the orange channel selected, it’s easy to take the saturation of that orange and dial it back a bit. That looksbetter.

[00:12:03] Let’s say now that I want to build on this teal and orange look; I’m going to do that using Split Toning. Split Toning is often associated with black and white going into a duotone territory but in this case, I’m going to go ahead and apply it to the color image. I’ll add some orange into the highlights and some blues into theshadows.

[00:12:22] Now, once again, my oranges have got a little bit too strong so I’ll take the intensity on that and drag it back a bit. And for the shadows, I want to change the color of the tint on there. Let’s make it a little bit more purple-y and then maybe bring the saturation up on that abit.

[00:12:38] If I come up with a color that I want to save, I can easily add that to my custom colors, and I can preview what the image looks like with or without that shadow and highlight tinting from here. Next, I’ll add some Graphical Effects. Under Graphical Effects, I can add a Frame, add Texture, and add Light Leaks. And each one of these has new options in DxO FilmPack6.

[00:12:58] I’ll start with the Frame. I’m going to start by adding something that doesn’t really work with this image but allows me to show you something pretty easily. This one’s called Opposite Corners, and as I change the size of this, you’ll notice that it eats into the image cropping away at the edges of the photo. That maybe fine for some looks but if I don’t want it to do that, I can switch the position to outside and now as I change the size of the frame, you’ll see that the image is not getting croppedinto.

[00:13:23] Now, let’s add a look that works on this one. There’s one called Classic Film Border that I like. I’ll go ahead and put that on the inside so it’s eating into the image and make that nice and big. That looks prettygood.

[00:13:34] Next, let’s add some texture. There’s a lot of new textures in here, and the thing with textures is you have to be pretty careful with them. A little bit goes a long way. That’s definitely too much but before I scale it back, I’ll use the randomized button to look for a different texture look that I like. That works… I’ll go ahead and take the intensity way down onthat.

[00:13:53] Next, let’s go to Light Leaks. I love adding a little bit of a light leak. There’s some new ones in here like “Color Leak 3” and from here, I can change where it’s coming from; have it coming from the left, top, right, or bottom. I’ll have it on the right and then once again, I’ll use that randomized button until I find a look that I like.Perfect.

[00:14:11] Now, if I want to save all of this as my own Custom Preset, I simply go here and I’ll call this “PhotoJoseph’s Favorite”, click OK and then back under the Preset menu, I can look at just my presets and find the one that I just created. I can then apply that preset to individual images or batch apply them to multiple photos back in thebrowser.

[00:14:35] Those are the highlights of what’s new in DxO PhotoLab 5 and DxO FilmPack 6. I hope you enjoyed this demo and if you do decide to purchase or upgrade, I have affiliate links down below in the description for that. Also, I do free webinars for DxO pretty regularly. To see that schedule, go to Photojoseph.com/DxO, which I regularly update with all upcoming webinars and include links to recordings of previous webinars you may havemissed.

[00:14:59] Thanks as always for watching. Don’t forget to subscribe and hit that notifications bell so you don’t miss out on more videos like this, and I’ll see you in the nextvideo.