653 CHAPTER Applying Filters IN THIS CHAPTER Artistic filters The Filter Gallery Smart Filters Custom filters M ost of the filters in Photoshop are just for fun. They don’t correct lighting or color, take out unwanted elements, or even change your photo into a black and white image—all fixes that are com- mon to a photo correction workflow. Instead, they add fun, artistic elements to your photo, making it look like a watercolor painting, a stained-glass win- dow, or an image embossed into metal. Many of these filters are added to an image using the Filter Gallery, a tool that allows you to preview the filter effect, change the filter settings, and add multiple filters at once. Other filters must be added using the Filter menu. Most of the filters can be added as Smart Filters that are non-destructive and editable. Understanding Smart Filters and how they work gives you the flexi- bility to add multiple filters, change the order they are applied, edit their set- tings, create a blending option for the filter (an option you don’t have in any other way), disable their effects, or delete them. In this chapter, I focus on the fun, artistic filters as I show you how to use these powerful tools to add them to an image and modify their effects. With dozens of creative filters that can be combined, modified, and customized, the possibilities are endless. 29_584743-ch20.indd 65329_584743-ch20.indd 653 5/3/10 10:41 AM5/3/10 10:41 AM Part VI: Artistic Effects 654 A Comprehensive Look at Artistic Effects Filters Most of the filters create artistic effects; they take your image and change it in a way that enhances its artistic value, at least for the project you are working on. These filters take a photograph and make it look like everything from a painting to a rubber stamp. These filters are divided into cate- gories based on their relative properties and are found in the Filter menu. This is a comprehensive list of the artistic effects filters and what they do. Cross-Ref This list doesn’t include the corrective filters—namely the Sharpen, Blur, Noise, and Lens Correction filters, which are covered in Chapter 14. Liquify is covered in Chapter 19. The Video filters are covered in Chapter 26. Vanishing Point is covered in Chapter 24. n Artistic These filters replicate effects that are usually achieved by hand rather than digitally. Although they don’t always do a realistic job of this, they sure give freehand-challenged artists like me options for creating drawing effects. All these options are available in the Filter Gallery: l Colored Pencil: This filter makes your image look as if the hard edges have been sketched using a colored pencil. This effect uses your background color as the color of the paper, so if your background is the default, you may get an image that is more gray than colorful. Change it to white or any other color to change the look. l Cutout: Like a mosaic made from cut paper, this effect makes your image look as if it has been constructed of roughly cut paper. l Dry Brush: This filter makes your image look as if it was painted using a dry brush tech- nique. This filter is subtle, although it reduces the colors in your image. l Film Grain: This filter adds a grainy look to your image by blending the shadows and midtones. l Fresco: This filter creates a rough image that mimics coarsely applied paint. l Neon Glow: This filter uses your foreground color and mixes it with a specified glow color to create a glow and soften your image. l Paint Daubs: This filter lets you choose from several brushes to create a painting from your image. The brush used and the settings applied can make your image range from a slightly softer look to an impressionistic look. l Palette Knife: This filter smoothes your image and introduces texture that simulates the canvas underneath. You can see an example of the Palette Knife effect in Figure 20.1. l Plastic Wrap: This filter makes your image look as if it’s been embossed and shrink-wrapped. 29_584743-ch20.indd 65429_584743-ch20.indd 654 5/3/10 10:41 AM5/3/10 10:41 AM Chapter 20: Applying Filters 655 FIGURE 20.1 The Palette Knife softens this image and gives it an impressionistic feel. l Poster Edges: This filter introduces banding in your image by significantly reducing the colors and creates black strokes along the harder edges of your image. l Rough Pastels: This filter simulates a drawing made with pastel chalk. You have lots of control over the texture applied to your image in this filter, with several textures to choose from and settings that increase the dimension and light of the texture chosen. l Smudge Stick: This filter softens an image by reducing the colors and smudging them. l Sponge: This filter introduces regular patches of missing color, as if the painting had been sponged while it was still wet. l Underpainting: This is another filter primarily for adding texture, although you can make a significant difference to the look by adjusting the brush strokes as well. It simulates painting your image over a textured background (the underpainting) and then reapplying the image over the top. l Watercolor: This filter simulates your image being painted with watercolors, giving it a soft, muted look. You can add contrast by increasing the shadow intensity. 29_584743-ch20.indd 65529_584743-ch20.indd 655 5/3/10 10:41 AM5/3/10 10:41 AM Part VI: Artistic Effects 656 Brush Strokes The Brush Strokes filters make your image look different by changing the way the brush strokes are applied to it. Just like the Artistic effects, these effects are meant to mimic fine art: l Accented Edges: This filter adds highlights or shadows to the edges of your image, accentuating them and giving your image ultra-sharp edges while smoothing out the other areas. l Angled Strokes: This filter creates the impression that your image is painted using diago- nal strokes. The lighter strokes are painted in a different direction than the darker strokes, creating a crosshatched appearance in areas of high contrast. l Crosshatch: This filter adds a crosshatch texture to your image. This effect creates a cleaner look than the angled strokes because the crosshatches are kept within the bounds of the colors contained in your image. l Dark Strokes: This effect creates more detail and darkness in the dark areas of your image because it creates short, tight strokes in those areas. It also softens the lighter areas in your image by using long, white strokes. l Ink Outlines: This filter simulates a picture drawn with ink, giving your image a con- trasty, textured look. You can see an image before and after Ink Outlines has been applied to it in Figure 20.2. FIGURE 20.2 Ink Outlines give this image a hard, contrasty, look. l Spatter: This filter gives your image the look of a painting that was created using a spatter airbrush, including lots of splotches and texture. l Sprayed Strokes: This effect is very subtle, especially if your image is high resolution. It simulates the effect of having your image painted by making strokes with a spray brush. You can determine which direction you want the strokes to run. l Sumi-e: In true Japanese style, the Sumi-e effect simulates a painting on rice paper using a heavily saturated brush. The end result is a rich painting with deep shadows. 29_584743-ch20.indd 65629_584743-ch20.indd 656 5/3/10 10:41 AM5/3/10 10:41 AM Chapter 20: Applying Filters 657 Distort The Distort filters change the way your image looks by reshaping it in different ways. Most of these filters are not available in the Filter Gallery simply because the dialog boxes have more intensive settings than the other filters. You can find the Diffuse Glow, Glass, and Ocean Ripple filters in the Filter Gallery. Here’s what the Distort filters do: l Diffuse Glow: This filter is great for creating the effect of an image taken with a soft diffusion filter popular with portrait and wedding photography. The effect is a soft, ethereal look. l Displace: For this filter, you need an image to specify as a displacement map. Any PSD will do. The Displace filter use the hard edges in the image specified to warp your original image around, as shown in Figure 20.3. Although I used a simple shape in this figure, you should try using another image just for fun. The results are interesting. FIGURE 20.3 The river plus the footprint creates the image displacement shown. l Glass: You can make your image look as if it’s being viewed through glass with this filter. Several settings simulate all different types of glass. l Ocean Ripple: This filter gives your image the illusion that it is being viewed through water. l Pinch: A mini-warp or liquify, this filter creates only one kind of distortion—a pinch to the center of your image that either pinches it in or bubbles it out. l Polar Coordinates: The idea behind this very interesting-looking filter is that after it has been applied, you can place the resulting image in a mirrored cylinder to create a cylinder anamorphosis. When you look into the cylinder, the image appears not only undistorted but in 3D. If you happen to have a mirrored cylinder handy, you can see if it works with Figure 20.4. 29_584743-ch20.indd 65729_584743-ch20.indd 657 5/3/10 10:41 AM5/3/10 10:41 AM Part VI: Artistic Effects 658 FIGURE 20.4 The Polar Coordinates distortion Note For some very interesting information on the cylinder anamorphosis art form, look up anamorphosis on Wikipedia. n l Ripple: Like disturbing water in the middle of a pond, you can create ripples in your image using this filter. l Shear: This filter allows you to distort your image using a curve. l Spherize: This filter wraps an image around a sphere, giving it a 3D effect. l Twirl: This filter twists an image around a point in the center of your image. You can choose how far to twist and in what direction. l Wave: Just as if the surface of your image were the surface of a swimming pool, you can create waves in it with several controls that let you customize a specific look. The results are similar to the Ripple filter, but you have much more control over the results using the wave settings. l ZigZag: This filter creates zigzag waves in an image starting in the center and gradually decreasing as the effect moves outward. Pixelate The Pixelate filters are filters that create different types of pixilation in your file. The dialog boxes are simple, focusing on the size of the pixilation. Some of the filters, such as the Fragment filter, don’t have a dialog box at all. None of these filters are in the Filter Gallery. Here’s what you can expect from the Pixelate filters: 29_584743-ch20.indd 65829_584743-ch20.indd 658 5/3/10 10:41 AM5/3/10 10:41 AM Chapter 20: Applying Filters 659 l Color Halftone: This filter takes each color channel, divides it into rectangles, and changes the rectangles into circles. The effect is similar to watching an old television set where the colored pixels were easy to pick out, except the pixels are round in this case. l Crystallize: This filter combines several adjoining pixels together to create hard-edge polygon shapes reminiscent of crystal formations. l Facet: This filter combines pixels in the same area to soften the look of the image. l Fragment: This filter adds texture to an image by averaging adjoining pixels and then off- setting them from one another. The Facet and Fragment filters don’t have dialog boxes but work with a set number of pixels. This means that if your images are high resolution, you probably won’t see a distinct difference when using either one of these filters. l Mezzotint: This filter can create a very cool color effect by creating strokes that are ran- domly assigned to be black, white, or a fully saturated color. The effect is an almost Art Deco effect that can really make your image pop. Although the resulting image is distinctly uninspiring in grayscale, you can see the dialog box in Figure 20.5. l Mosaic: This filter makes your image look as if it were created from square tiles of pixels. You can determine the number of pixels that are grouped into each tile, which makes it possible to create a visible effect with a high-resolution image. l Pointillize: With this filter, you can turn your image into a painting that looks like it could have been created by George Seurat. This filter creates solid color points throughout your image. FIGURE 20.5 The Mezzotint dialog box gives you several stroke options. 29_584743-ch20.indd 65929_584743-ch20.indd 659 5/3/10 10:41 AM5/3/10 10:41 AM Part VI: Artistic Effects 660 Render The Render filters range from the simple Clouds filter that creates clouds from the foreground and background colors without any input from the user, to creating a Lighting Effects filter that can require detailed input. These filters are not in the Filter Gallery. l Clouds: This filter uses the foreground and background colors in a blend that resembles blotches more than clouds. You want to create a new layer on which to create the clouds, because the effect replaces anything that was on the layer before the clouds were rendered. l Difference Clouds: This filter creates clouds using the foreground and background colors just like the Clouds filter and then blends them with the existing pixels using the Difference Blend mode. This filter can be applied multiple times for a different effect each time. l Fibers: This filter creates streaks of color from the foreground and background colors that intermix to resemble fibers. This filter also replaces the pixels on the selected layer. Tip Not only can filters be added on top of one another to create unique effects, filters such as clouds and fibers, which can be placed on their own layer, can be used with the Blend modes to create unique effects on the lay- ers beneath them. n l Lens Flare: This filter does a pretty good job of creating a realistic lens flare in your image. You can choose one of several flares and place it anywhere in your image. l Lighting Effects: This filter adds unlimited lighting effects to your image to create dra- matic results. You can create several lights, place them anywhere in your image, and change their properties so they resemble different types of light from spotlights to gel lights. Several presets are previewed for you in Figure 20.6. You also can create your own lighting effects and save them as additional presets. FIGURE 20.6 These presets, among others, can be used to create light in your image. Five lights upSoft omniCircle of light (modified) 29_584743-ch20.indd 66029_584743-ch20.indd 660 5/3/10 10:41 AM5/3/10 10:41 AM . soft, muted look. You can add contrast by increasing the shadow intensity. 29_584743-ch20.indd 65529_584743-ch20.indd 655 5/3/10 10:41 AM5/3/10 10:41 AM Part VI: Artistic Effects 656 Brush Strokes The. possibilities are endless. 29_584743-ch20.indd 65329_584743-ch20.indd 653 5/3/10 10:41 AM5/3/10 10:41 AM Part VI: Artistic Effects 654 A Comprehensive Look at Artistic Effects Filters Most of the filters. is covered in Chapter 24. n Artistic These filters replicate effects that are usually achieved by hand rather than digitally. Although they don’t always do a realistic job of this, they sure