Reference: 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 unfeathered 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 colored 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:

1. 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.
2. As indicated above, filters can be applied to selections. The active, selected layer is the one that will be affected by the filter.
3. 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.
4. 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.
   
5. 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.

 
I have a tutorial that you may find useful in the Elements section called Artistic Filtering (the technique works the same in Photoshop). It describes a better method of applying filters to pictures of people.

So, on to the first filter. Starting with the Artistic filters, and the first one in that section, which is the Colored Pencil filter, next

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)
If you don’t know how to expand a zipped file or use Acrobat Reader, download the file, above, and then go here to find instructions

Elements Tutorials
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Reference: Elements Tools
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Pre-Beginner
Pre-Beginner II
Why Layers?
Holes
Fade In
Playing With Styles
Learning Effects
Redeye Removal
Artistic Filtering
Symmetrical Flowers
Simulated Alpha Channels
Layer Masks

text sample with no filter applied

See the first filter, which is the Colored Pencils, next.

Copyright © 2004 by Jay Arraich.
All rights reserved.
All photographs copyright © 2004 by Jay Arraich
jay@arraich.com