Filters, Quick Review

Filters
It adds spice to Photoshop. It can fulfill the need of beginner as well as professionals. The first time user of Photoshop can just open an image and apply filters with single click. Professional will be more serious and can create wonders out of it. Let us see the art, science and philosophy behind the filters. Before we proceed further it is necessary to mention that we are going to observe the features of the filters provided by Photoshop only. Third party filters is another vast subject need separate attention.

So, what is filter?
Filters are the ready-made effects grouped under filter menu of Photoshop can be applied with single clicked either on the entire image or a selection. Photoshop 6.0 come up with rich variety of filters starting from artistic to digimark. In general filters are used to add special effects to image. It can be used for photo retouching. It is used to create realistic textures, stunning text effects. It can entirely change the environment of an image. Generally filters come up with the dialog box, which consist of small preview window and preview check box. Preview window will show the immediate effect of the filter on the image without actually applying on it. With the help of preview check box it can be seen applied on the original image also. Preview window provides another good facility. It pans an image so that you can see any part of the image and judge the effect of the filter on that particular part. Let us check out some main filters.

Artistic
As a name suggest this filter is used to achieve artistic effects. You can get traditional fine arts effects with this filter. Effects resembles with natural and traditional artistic creations created with different types of brushes, strokes, colored papers, different styles of painting, posterized effects etc.

Filters > Artistic > Cut Out

Blur
It is an important filter used for photo retouching work. Most of the time it is applied on scanned image. It is used to soften entire or the part of an image. In the technical words it can be explained like, it smoothens the transition between hard edges of an image.

Filters > Blur > Radial blur

Brush Strokes
It is similar to artistic filters but more using brush strokes and ink effects generating traditional fine art type of output.

Filters > Brush Strokes > Angled Strokes

Direction Balance : 50
Stroke Length : 3
Sharpness : 3

Distort
These filters takes times to apply hence require more memory for smooth working. It distorts images and creates reshaping effects.

Filters > Distort > Ripple

Amount : 100%
Size : Medium

Noise
This is a very popular filter among Photoshop users. It is useful in creating textures. It adds grains to provide the base for textures. Other filters in this groups like median, dust & Scratches, despeckle are used extensively for photo retouching.

Filters > Noise > Add Noise

Amount : 16%
Distribution : Uniform
Monochromatic

Pixelate
It creates small cells in an image based on similar color.

Filters > Pixelate > Facet

Render
If you want to work with light reflections, cloud like patterns, this is the right choice. This is a powerful filter providing different option for lighting effects and clouds.

Filters > Render > Lighting Effects

Sharpen
It sharpens the soft edges by increasing the contrast of the pixels.

Filters > Sharpen > Sharpen

Sketch
It is similar to artistic as it creates traditional fine art effects. It resembles much with hand drawn looks when it is applied on an image.

Filters > Sketch > Water Paper

Fiber Length : 3
Brightness : 50%
Contrast : 50%

Stylize
It is used to create impressionistic effects.

Filters > Stylize > Diffuse

Mode : Normal

Texture
It is used to create textures. It gives realistic look like sand, paper etc. to an image.

Filters > Texture > Texturizer

Texture : Sandstone
Scaling : 100%
Relief : 4
Light Direction : Top

Video
It is used to smoothen the images captured on videos.

Other
This is used to create your own filters

Digimark
It is used to add digital watermark to an image which is essential for copyright information