Digital Film Tools has recently released PhotoCopy, a plugin that at first glance seems unimpressive and ridiculously easy to duplicate with the color correction and compositing tools found within After Effects. Further inspection indicates, however, that PhotoCopy is a delightful suite that allows the user to easily mimic the look of famous movies, photos, paintings, and processes.
PhotoCopy looks and feels like an affordable and easy-to-use finishing tool for your footage. Available exclusively for Mac, a singe license is good for Final Cut Pro, Avid, and After Effects.
PhotoCopy has a sleek and easy to use browser for presets.
Ease of Use
PhotoCopy could not be easier to use. Simply apply the effect to the desired clip, then load a preset.
The presets work great as is, but are also great starting points for your own looks. Color, Texture, Vignette options are available for the tweaking. And the ability to save settings and create presets assures that the more you use PhotoCopy, the seamlessly it fits into your workflow.
Other options with the PhotoCopy software.
Depth of Options
Included with PhotoCopy are 94 film looks, 72 painting looks, 40 photo looks, and 30 "process" looks to start from. The film looks are the most useful, in my opinion, while the others offer interesting starting points for your creativity.
Most impressive is the ability to "match" a look. This is helpful for creating consistency between your own videos. Meaning, that if you enjoyed a certain look that you achieved once, you can easily match it again by loading the video into PhotoCopy and clicking the 'match' feature.
One could get rather crafty with this feature by importing stills or scenes from blockbuster movies to quickly match its look and then saving that look as a preset. This makes it easy to build a whole arsenal of unique film looks available for all of your projects.
A quick look I made by matching a frame from Eraserhead and using the "Match" feature.
Performance
PhotoCopy seems to work best, as a finishing tool. An effect that you should use on entire sequences after primary color correction has been completed. While I appreciate having the flexibilty to use PhotoCopy directly in Final Cut Pro, I preferred working with it in After Effects. It seems to run more efficiently here as well.
Within After Effects, PhotoCopy was able to be applied to Adjustment Layers for maximum control, applied to masked layers, and could even be applied directly to text for quick gradients, grain, and colors for your titles
PhotoCopy makes it easy to create interesting looks for your text.
Value
At $195 PhotoCopy is hard to beat when it comes to value. Of course it has it's limitations in options, and the 'match' feature does not always work flawlessly, but the advantages and flexibilty are huge. The only thing lacking in PhotoCopy is expandability. While the option to save your own presets is nice, it would be great to see Digital Film Tools offer expansion packs featuring new looks, or even a community where users can exchange presets with one another.
Final Comments Digital Film Tools PhotoCopy is a great plugin for your color correction/film looks toolbox. It is enjoyable and fun to use and offers practical, real-world color correction that most filmmakers will use time and time again.
Ease
of Use
10.0
Depth
of Options
8.0
Performance
10.0
Value
vs. Cost
9.0
Overall Score
9.0
Nikc Miller is co-producer of Livelihood, and director and editor of several award winning short films. He currently works as an After Effects Artist at Render Perfect Productions in Baltimore. Nikc specializes in consulting small businesses and entrepreneurs on how to increase their visibility by using video and multimedia.
Digital Film Tools has recently released PhotoCopy, a plugin that at first glance seems unimpressive and ridiculously easy to duplicate with the color correction and compositing tools found within After Effects. Further inspection indicates, however, that PhotoCopy is a delightful suite that allows the user to easily mimic the look of famous movies, photos, paintings, and processes. 
