Filters
All the special effects, or “decorative” filters are featured in this
section. Workhorse filters such as the Unsharp Mask, and Gaussian Blur,
are not. All of the Render, Video, Sharpen, and most of the Noise
filters are not included. Filters which required an image map, such as
the Displace filter, are not shown. Even without these, there are
seventy five filters featured here.
Every filter is shown with the same sequence of images. First, you
will see the poppy, shown below, with the filter applied only to the
surrounding foliage. A selection which included only the foliage was
loaded from a mask saved as an alpha channel. The mask had a feather
that extended outward, but not inward.
To get this edge on the mask, I created an alpha channel from a
selection of the flower’s outline with zero feather, loaded it as a
selection, inverted it, added a ten pixel feather, and saved that as a
second alpha channel. I then loaded this second feathered channel as a
selection and subtracted the original un-feathered channel from it. Its
edge looked like this:
What this did was allow the filter to fade up to, but not into the
flower.
The second image will be the same poppy photograph, but without the
mask, so that the filter affects the entire image.
The third and fourth examples may, or may not be shown, depending
on whether the filter had any effect on them, or if, in some cases, they
were to awful to be of any interest. By this I mean the original image
was made completely unrecognizable by the filter.
The red stripes over green were created on a layer above a white
background layer. I gave the layer a gradient mask from top to bottom,
thinking a varied degree of transparency in the filtered layer might be
of interest.
The last image is self explanatory. Regular black text on a white
background. I merged all the various text layers (4) into one before
applying the filters. Note that you must rasterize your type layers
before you can apply filters to them. Select your type layer in the
Layers palette, and then choose Layer > Rasterize > Type. Once it is
rasterized, the type will no longer be editable as type.
Almost all images were created by accepting the default settings in
each filter’s dialog box. The only exceptions were Shear, Twirl, and
Zigzag. Changes will be noted on those filter’s pages.
You can proceed through all the filters by clicking the “next”
links, or you can use the Jump menu, at left, which lists all the
filters in alphabetical order. It also features a list of the category
names such as Pixilate, or Sketch which, when clicked, will take you to
the first filter in that category. Clicking “next ” will then
take you through all the filters of that type.
The categorization used by Adobe makes very little sense. For
example, they have coloured pencils in Artistic, and Photocopy under
Sketch. That’s nuts. However, the sequence of pages, if you click
“next” will proceed through the filters as they appear in the
Filters menu from top to bottom, since many of you are probably used to
finding the filters in this order.
There is very little text accompanying each filter’s illustrations.
The pictures should speak for themselves. I really don’t know that much
about filters, anyway. If I like how they look, I use them.
A few, very basic tips on using filters:
- Many of the filters require a lot of RAM. They can take a long
time to be applied to large, high resolution images. It is suggested
that you make a selection of a representative area on such images, and
apply the filter to just that area to see if you like it before
applying it to the entire image.
- As indicated above, filters can be applied to selections. The
active, selected layer is the one that will be affected by the filter.
- Many of the filters only work on RGB images. None of the
filters will work on 1 bit Bitmap mode, or indexed-color mode images.
- All filters can have their opacity, and blending mode edited
immediately after they have been applied by selecting Edit > Fade. The
Fade command will appear as Fade [name of last filter applied]. You
will see the dialog box shown below, and can preview your changes as
you move the opacity slider, and change the blend mode. This is a
very useful option. Remember, however, that it can only be
accessed immediately after you have applied the filter.
- Filters which look awful on one image will look great on another.
You should experiment with different types of pictures to find ones
you like.
So, on to the first filter. Starting with the Artistic filters, and
the first one in that section, which is the Coloured Pencil filter.
If you would like to download a zipped pdf file of this entire
section to use for reference, please click on the link below, and save
it to your hard drive. The pdf includes a fully bookmarked Index.
Reference:
Filters pdf
3.87 MB (zip file) |
