Photoshop CS4: The Missing Manual

Chapter 15. The Wide World of Filters

Filters apply special effects to your images. They’re both incredibly useful and outrageously fun. You can run them on image layers, masks, channels, shapes, and even Type layers. The list of special effects you can create by applying filters once, twice, or even ten times is a mile long. There are a slew of the little buggers too, each with its own special brand of pixel wrangling. As of this writing, Photoshop sports 13 different filter categories, each of which includes anywhere from 2 to 15 filters! You’ve already seen a few filters in action like the ones used for sharpening (Chapter 11), blurring (Chapter 10, Selective Slimming), adding texture to type (Chapter 14, Texture from filters), and mapping one image to the contours of another (Chapter 7, Mapping One Image onto Another). But that’s just a tiny sliver of what’s available.

In this chapter you’ll be immersed in the world of filters and discover how you can use them to:

• Transform your image with painterly effects (Artistic).

• Create a shallow depth-of-field effect (Lens Blur).

• Fix funky edge halos or color fringes (Artistic).

• Add artistic edge effects to your images (Brush Strokes).

• Make a portrait pop with a dark-edge vignette (A Filters Tour).

• Add texture (A Filters Tour and Texture).

• Create additional lighting (A Filters Tour).

• Conjure up fake snow (A Filters Tour).

• Rescue a slightly out-of-focus image (Emboss).

• Turn a photo into a pencil sketch (Stylize).

• Tighten or expand a layer mask (