Tiffen Dfx 3 review

There’s also a wide array of standard processing tools including levels, noise reduction and detail enhancements, plus new deblocking and debanding tools for eradicating JPEG artefacts. Take a peek into the parameters panel for each preset, meanwhile, and you’ll find a staggeringly deep array of adjustments – some presets have more than 50 different sliders, checkboxes and dropdown menus to play around with.

There’s much more to Dfx than just filters, though. Using layers and an array of blending and opacity adjustments, individual effects can be combined at will. To help out in producing even more advanced compositions, the application also features a suprisingly powerful array of selection and masking tools.

EZ Mask is far and away the most powerful of these, turning rough scribbles around the outline of objects into quick, accurate selections, but it’s also possible to paint masks in, draw a smoothly curved B-spline path using the Pen tool, apply a gradient or spot mask, or trace around objects with Dfx’s equivalent of Photoshop’s Magnetic Lasso.

We won’t pretend Dfx doesn’t have the odd rough edge. The interface feels terribly clumsy at times, especially on screens below 1,920 x 1,080 – the panels take up a little too much room. Although these panels can be docked and tabbed and spread across multiple monitors, they don’t always behave predictably outside their standard locations.

There is batch processing here, allowing a custom preset to be applied to multiple images, but there’s no file management panel within the application. Instead, images must be opened one at a time. Noise reduction, meanwhile, isn’t a patch on Lightroom’s.

All things considered, however, Tiffen Dfx is still a hugely likeable package at a very reasonable price. It lets those with little knowledge and skill create professional-style effects very quickly, and there are so many presets, it will be some time before you’ve worked your way around even a fraction of the tools on offer. Warmly recommended.