PhotoCopy Application Review From Digital Film Tools
PhotoCopy is an application that can be used as a plugin within Lightroom, Photoshop, Photoshop Elements or Apple’s Aperture. When you purchase the software you are able to use it on any of these applications. This program basically is a filter applied to your image that replicates the look of certain famous pieces of art (or movies) such as Van Gough’s Sunflowers or Imogen Cunninghams Two Sisters. It’s like presets for your editing that are based off famous works of art.
Here is a brief intro from the creator:
pho•to•copy (foh-tuh-kop-ee): Software that creates a photographic reproduction of a printed or graphic work made with a process in which a new image is formed by the action of proprietary image analysis, color, texture and light. Whether it’s still or moving images, the key attributes are copied from one image and applied to another.
We have painstakingly analyzed the brightness, color, tone, detail, grain and texture of some of the world’s greatest movies, paintings, photographs and historical photographic processes. The DNA of these masterpieces can now be applied to your very own images with PhotoCopy. The color, tone and brightness of the original work are replicated while the texture, grain and detail are simulated.
Although the application is a Plugin or Lightroom or Photoshop it does open up separately in Lightroom as a separate app. This isn’t integrated as part of Lightroom. What you have to do is select a photo in lightroom and then choose to Edit in PhotoCopy. This will open up a new screen for the PhotoCopy app. The navigation of the application is very straightforward and simple to learn. On the left you have a list of the different presets you can choose from. These are broken down into 5 different categories:
Each section gives you a wide variety of presets and there are some pretty good ones in there. After you choose a preset you can further customize it by adjusting the strength of the preset with brightness, color, tone, detail, grain and texture. This is really helpful and gives you a lot more control compared to just a normal preset in Lightroom. This way if you like a certain effect you can really fine tune how much of certain aspects of the preset you want to apply to your image. Once you have the image set to how you would like it you can save these settings as a custom preset.
They also have a few useful views to compare a before and after. You can do a side by side, vertical or horizontal comparison.
Overall the application worked great for me and was really fun to play around with styles that you can connect with from movies and famous works of art. I also loved the processes presets and being able to convert to some cool old processes like Gum over Cyanotype. The application is $95 and includes presets for 94 movies, 72 paintings, 40 photographs and 30 historical processes.
A few wish list items that would be nice to see would be brushes and layers. If you had the ability to brush on (or off) the effect to only certain parts of the image that could be pretty powerful. Also if you could layer on multiple effects to combine effects that would be very useful also.
You can purchase PhotoCopy online here:
DigitalFilmTools.com
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