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Photoshop Digital Picture Editing Filters and Effects
Note: This section uses Adobe Photoshop
for Picture Editing
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Photoshop effects and filters are used all the time to give pictures a creative or artistic look, and helping you define the photo for your individual need. Using filters you can adjust a picture slightly to make it more dynamic or drastically to give it a whole new look. But the problem is there is a ton of filters and going through them all can be a tedious task, especially since I personally don't use half of them. So on this page you will learn how to use blurring, artistic designs like strokes, textures, distortion effects, and more. It can help give your photos a creative edge, and help further your experience as a freelance digital photographer. This will be the second page you should read after the basics if you have not read the basics and you don't know them very well go back to that page.
Jump to a Photoshop Filter's Subject
-Filter Purposes- -Things you should know-
-Painting, Drawing and Sketch Filters- -Blur Filters-
-Distort Filters- -Texture Filters- -Other Filters-
Besides using artistic filters other filters can easily be used to draw attention towards the message you are trying to convey. Although the most practical use of this is advertisements, it is also used in a plethora of other fields like graphic design and logo design. Filters such as disort, blur, stylize, and render are able to do just that, they can alter the style in which the photo is presented fitting a motif. Giving it the ability to blend with fonts and other objects added to the picture. To sum things up filters are obviously important and are used nearly everyday in freelance photo editing, there are a ton of filters to learn so try messing around with pretty much all of them to get a general sense of what they do.
Another thing about filters is that they all have different parameters that will come up when you click on the effect. A lot of these parameters will need to be worked with in a sense of trial and error, also try clicking on the button 'preview' letting you see your whole picture and how it is affected by the change.
Adding artistic effects is really easy and drastically changes the look of your picture. The effect I used on this picture of a car is under FILTER - ARTISTIC - DRY BRUSH, I gave the parameters a medium brush size, no brush detail and medium texture. You can make your picture look like a slightly blurred photograph or make it look like full fledge painting. So you can mess around with the Artistic Filters I recommend trying Dry Brush, Paint Daubs, cutout and Fresco. And in FILTER - BRUSH STROKES try Accented Edges, Angled Strokes and Cross Hatch.
Other Creative things you can do with these effects are to only select a portion of the picture such as a building or a person, then only apply the effect to the selected part this will give the object a surreal look. Take a look at the church above, I selected it with the straight edge lasso tool, and then applyed accented edges under Brush Strokes. Pictures of simple textures will give it a drawn look great for webpage graphics and advertising logos (look at the flower above).
The effects in the sketch section do similar things to the stroke and artistic filters, just one thing to remember when using the sketch filters is that most of them are affected by the colors you have in your palette. So I would eye drop a similar color or choose colors that would go good with your scheme.
For this picture (which is of my editor andy) I used TORN EDGES under SKETCH I put a Dark blue and a off White in my palette, giving it a contrasty look. This now appears to be a sketch or comic like drawing, making it so you don't ever have to draw or get an artist for whatever project your working on.
Check out Video Tutorials: Click Here!
If used correctly blurring a photograph can be used for all kinds of things like catalogs, brochures, advertisements, and anything that calls for a picture to blend into the background. By using a plain blur it will make it seem out of focus putting this behind text can cause a depth effect making people understanding the meaning of the text.
Look at this somewhat bad example I have given, the picture is blurred so you get the wedding imagery but it also makes you pay attention to what the text and foreground picture is saying. This type of blur is under FILTER - BLUR - GAUSSIAN BLUR, a simple type of blur that gives you the option of how much blurring you want.
Besides conveying depth perception blurring can also be used to show motion simplifing the act of taking a photo of something in motion. Say if you needed a car going about 55 miles an hour for photo, take a picture of a parked car and use the motion blur under filters to make the car appear in motion.
The first filter in the distort filters were going to talk about is the Diffuse Glow, this filter in particular gives a great lighting effect to contrasty night pictures. It gives the lights in your picture a surreal exposure look to them that is ideal for artistic photography. This type of filter is the only one really like this in the Distort filter category, and probably used the most over other Distort filters. This effect is found under FILTER - DISTORT - DIFFUSE GLOW, after that
setting the parameters is easy, graininess should be left at zero for the most realism but if you want to give it an even more painting esque quality then move it to 1 or 2, then all you have to do is choose the glow amount, and your done. I recommend remembering this filter, if there is ever a Lights picture that you aren't sure about send it through the diffuse glow and see if it helps.
The other types of filters aren't used as much as diffuse glow but still can be helpful, they mostly have the quality of bending the picture in different ways. It's hard to say what this is good for, besides advertisement, but you're creative people you will find a use for it.
So the other distort filters you need to know about are...Pinch, Spherize and zig zag, they all relatively do the same thing, but these are the ones I use. For this sweet Kodak Camera ad I did, I used the ZIG ZAG filter and used the POND RIPPLES setting. Pretty simple, I just wanted the viewer to get the idea of something crystal clear so I made it look like water ripples. If you want to know more about this particular type of photoshop editing check out the Advertisement Page.
Start out by opening a picture FILE - OPEN, then check if it is locked (meaning that there is a little padlock icon on the layer) if there is... copy that layer by dragging it to the 'create new layer icon' next to the trash can icon, and finally delete the locked layer.
Next you are going to want to copy that layer, once again by dragging the layer into the 'create new layer icon,' so far you should have two of the exact same pictures in your layers tool bar. Next you need to select the part of the picture (in the top layer) in which you are going to turn into a texture, like a wall or ceramic pot etc. You can do this a couple of ways: use the magic wand tool to select the object... if the entire object is not selected hold down the SHIFT button and click the unselected part of your object. By holding down SHIFT you can add additional selections to the selection you already have. Also if you are having trouble using the the magic wand tool try raising or lowering the TOLERANCE LEVEL, this will make it so the selection space is more or less sensitive to that one color you are trying to select.
So if you look at the picture to the right, I started using the magic wand tool to select parts of the picture, obviously I am going to be selecting the beige wall and turning that into a textured wall. I used a TOLERANCE of 12 because the wall is mostly the same color, raise the tolerance to the 40's if you have a lot more shading and texture difference. And after I held SHIFT a couple times to get the full area selected i'm done with this part.
The other method of selecting a color is far easier but doesn't always work with heavily shaded areas. Select the top layer and go to SELECT - COLOR RANGE.
This screen will pop up, this is the color selection window all you need to do after this is select the color in the picture you wish to select. Like I selected the beige wall and then clicked okay, if you dont have the proper amount selected... try again only this time adjust the fuzziness, raise it: if you want more color selected lower it: if you want less selected. You can tell how much is selected by the contrasting black and white shades.
Now we should have the amount we want selected on the top layer, now we have to apply the texture filter. This is simply done by going to FILTER - TEXTURE - TEXTURIZER, this window should pop up.
Choose what kind of texture you want, I chose sandstone for my wall you can choose whatever you want, relief lets you decide how deep your textures are and scaling lets you choose how big your singular pieces of the texture are. Make sure your texture looks real so don't add any abrupt or fake looking designs. Click OKAY and you are done with choosing the texture.
Now it might look a bit fake so we need to smooth out the texture to make it a bit more believable, that is why we created to layers. So just to recap you should of only applied the filter to the top layer and the bottom layer should be the original picture.
Select the top layer and in the layers bar move the opacity bar down slightly, letting the original picture come through a bit more, evening out the fake looking texture. Also delete any unsightly side effects of the texturizing on the top layer, the bottom layer will be underneath so you don't have to worry about deleting your picture. Merge the two layers together and you are done, you have created a texturized photo.
This is the finished product, the wall appears to have more depth and keeps the sense of realism.
Sharpen - These effects quite simply sharpen a pictures pixel rate, causing a crisper picture. It works pretty well, but not always, if you have a slightly blurry picture try this out using SHARPEN or SHARPEN MORE, be careful because to much sharpening will cause heavy pixelation.
Noise - By adding noise you are creating a ton of pixels of different colors, or monochromatic noise which is black and white.
Pixelate - Effects that do what they say...pixelate. Things like MOSAIC will create that blur effect they have on cops and effects like CRYSTALLIZE will give it a stained glass window effect.
Stylize - Most of these effects will fully transform your whole picture, like EMBOSS will give it your picture that stone sculpture look. I don't use these that often but every once and a while I do use WIND, to give it that high exposure motion look.
Find all current special offers on Adobe products.
Photoshop effects and filters are used all the time to give pictures a creative or artistic look, and helping you define the photo for your individual need. Using filters you can adjust a picture slightly to make it more dynamic or drastically to give it a whole new look. But the problem is there is a ton of filters and going through them all can be a tedious task, especially since I personally don't use half of them. So on this page you will learn how to use blurring, artistic designs like strokes, textures, distortion effects, and more. It can help give your photos a creative edge, and help further your experience as a freelance digital photographer. This will be the second page you should read after the basics if you have not read the basics and you don't know them very well go back to that page.
-Filter Purposes- -Things you should know-
-Painting, Drawing and Sketch Filters- -Blur Filters-
-Distort Filters- -Texture Filters- -Other Filters-
Filter Purpose and Job Application
The main purpose to adding filters in photoshop is to add dynamics or completely alter the look of your picture altogether. Using filters like the artistic ones you will soon read below can help you alter a pictures appearance into a painting or drawing like platform, making others easily relate and notice the picture. Look at an ad or anything with commercial labels and pictures on it, it won't take long for you to find a picture that has completely altered its look using these types of effects, such as artistic, sketch or strokes. CD covers of your favorite bands extremely alter normal pictures to get a great original look, cereal boxes show cartoon versions of people eating the cereal on the back, I have even seen people turn real photos into comic like stills or cartoon esque representation, I was amazed to see this on a show called "Tom Goes to the Mayor" on Adult Swim - Cartoon Network.Besides using artistic filters other filters can easily be used to draw attention towards the message you are trying to convey. Although the most practical use of this is advertisements, it is also used in a plethora of other fields like graphic design and logo design. Filters such as disort, blur, stylize, and render are able to do just that, they can alter the style in which the photo is presented fitting a motif. Giving it the ability to blend with fonts and other objects added to the picture. To sum things up filters are obviously important and are used nearly everyday in freelance photo editing, there are a ton of filters to learn so try messing around with pretty much all of them to get a general sense of what they do.
Before we Start
Before we talk about the specific filters you need to know some things about them first. When applying filters it will only apply to one layer or the layer you have selected. If you want more than one layer to have the effect you need to either add them seperately or merge the two layers together with CTRL + E. If you add the effect to the two or more layers seperately than the effect wont interact with the layers, but individually causing a slightly different effect. But if you merge two layers together and add a filter you can't! disconnect them into two layers again.Another thing about filters is that they all have different parameters that will come up when you click on the effect. A lot of these parameters will need to be worked with in a sense of trial and error, also try clicking on the button 'preview' letting you see your whole picture and how it is affected by the change.
Turning Pictures into Paintings and Drawings
Adding artistic effects is really easy and drastically changes the look of your picture. The effect I used on this picture of a car is under FILTER - ARTISTIC - DRY BRUSH, I gave the parameters a medium brush size, no brush detail and medium texture. You can make your picture look like a slightly blurred photograph or make it look like full fledge painting. So you can mess around with the Artistic Filters I recommend trying Dry Brush, Paint Daubs, cutout and Fresco. And in FILTER - BRUSH STROKES try Accented Edges, Angled Strokes and Cross Hatch.
Other Creative things you can do with these effects are to only select a portion of the picture such as a building or a person, then only apply the effect to the selected part this will give the object a surreal look. Take a look at the church above, I selected it with the straight edge lasso tool, and then applyed accented edges under Brush Strokes. Pictures of simple textures will give it a drawn look great for webpage graphics and advertising logos (look at the flower above).
The effects in the sketch section do similar things to the stroke and artistic filters, just one thing to remember when using the sketch filters is that most of them are affected by the colors you have in your palette. So I would eye drop a similar color or choose colors that would go good with your scheme.For this picture (which is of my editor andy) I used TORN EDGES under SKETCH I put a Dark blue and a off White in my palette, giving it a contrasty look. This now appears to be a sketch or comic like drawing, making it so you don't ever have to draw or get an artist for whatever project your working on.
Check out Video Tutorials: Click Here!
If used correctly blurring a photograph can be used for all kinds of things like catalogs, brochures, advertisements, and anything that calls for a picture to blend into the background. By using a plain blur it will make it seem out of focus putting this behind text can cause a depth effect making people understanding the meaning of the text.Look at this somewhat bad example I have given, the picture is blurred so you get the wedding imagery but it also makes you pay attention to what the text and foreground picture is saying. This type of blur is under FILTER - BLUR - GAUSSIAN BLUR, a simple type of blur that gives you the option of how much blurring you want.
Besides conveying depth perception blurring can also be used to show motion simplifing the act of taking a photo of something in motion. Say if you needed a car going about 55 miles an hour for photo, take a picture of a parked car and use the motion blur under filters to make the car appear in motion.
Photoshop Distort Filters
The first filter in the distort filters were going to talk about is the Diffuse Glow, this filter in particular gives a great lighting effect to contrasty night pictures. It gives the lights in your picture a surreal exposure look to them that is ideal for artistic photography. This type of filter is the only one really like this in the Distort filter category, and probably used the most over other Distort filters. This effect is found under FILTER - DISTORT - DIFFUSE GLOW, after that
setting the parameters is easy, graininess should be left at zero for the most realism but if you want to give it an even more painting esque quality then move it to 1 or 2, then all you have to do is choose the glow amount, and your done. I recommend remembering this filter, if there is ever a Lights picture that you aren't sure about send it through the diffuse glow and see if it helps.
The other types of filters aren't used as much as diffuse glow but still can be helpful, they mostly have the quality of bending the picture in different ways. It's hard to say what this is good for, besides advertisement, but you're creative people you will find a use for it.
So the other distort filters you need to know about are...Pinch, Spherize and zig zag, they all relatively do the same thing, but these are the ones I use. For this sweet Kodak Camera ad I did, I used the ZIG ZAG filter and used the POND RIPPLES setting. Pretty simple, I just wanted the viewer to get the idea of something crystal clear so I made it look like water ripples. If you want to know more about this particular type of photoshop editing check out the Advertisement Page.
Photoshop Texture Filters
Applying texture filters helps bring depth to a somewhat lifeless picture and contours shapes to better fit the atmosphere of the photograph. Depending on which texture filter you use, you can form a plain lifeless wall into a radiant sandstone wall or brickwall. Although this is a small alteration that might not even be noticed by half the people viewing your picture, it is still very important to getting a dynamic look with your photo editing.
Start out by opening a picture FILE - OPEN, then check if it is locked (meaning that there is a little padlock icon on the layer) if there is... copy that layer by dragging it to the 'create new layer icon' next to the trash can icon, and finally delete the locked layer. Next you are going to want to copy that layer, once again by dragging the layer into the 'create new layer icon,' so far you should have two of the exact same pictures in your layers tool bar. Next you need to select the part of the picture (in the top layer) in which you are going to turn into a texture, like a wall or ceramic pot etc. You can do this a couple of ways: use the magic wand tool to select the object... if the entire object is not selected hold down the SHIFT button and click the unselected part of your object. By holding down SHIFT you can add additional selections to the selection you already have. Also if you are having trouble using the the magic wand tool try raising or lowering the TOLERANCE LEVEL, this will make it so the selection space is more or less sensitive to that one color you are trying to select.
So if you look at the picture to the right, I started using the magic wand tool to select parts of the picture, obviously I am going to be selecting the beige wall and turning that into a textured wall. I used a TOLERANCE of 12 because the wall is mostly the same color, raise the tolerance to the 40's if you have a lot more shading and texture difference. And after I held SHIFT a couple times to get the full area selected i'm done with this part.
The other method of selecting a color is far easier but doesn't always work with heavily shaded areas. Select the top layer and go to SELECT - COLOR RANGE.
This screen will pop up, this is the color selection window all you need to do after this is select the color in the picture you wish to select. Like I selected the beige wall and then clicked okay, if you dont have the proper amount selected... try again only this time adjust the fuzziness, raise it: if you want more color selected lower it: if you want less selected. You can tell how much is selected by the contrasting black and white shades.
Now we should have the amount we want selected on the top layer, now we have to apply the texture filter. This is simply done by going to FILTER - TEXTURE - TEXTURIZER, this window should pop up.
Choose what kind of texture you want, I chose sandstone for my wall you can choose whatever you want, relief lets you decide how deep your textures are and scaling lets you choose how big your singular pieces of the texture are. Make sure your texture looks real so don't add any abrupt or fake looking designs. Click OKAY and you are done with choosing the texture.
Now it might look a bit fake so we need to smooth out the texture to make it a bit more believable, that is why we created to layers. So just to recap you should of only applied the filter to the top layer and the bottom layer should be the original picture.
Select the top layer and in the layers bar move the opacity bar down slightly, letting the original picture come through a bit more, evening out the fake looking texture. Also delete any unsightly side effects of the texturizing on the top layer, the bottom layer will be underneath so you don't have to worry about deleting your picture. Merge the two layers together and you are done, you have created a texturized photo.
This is the finished product, the wall appears to have more depth and keeps the sense of realism.
Other Photoshop Filters
Real quick, I want to go over some filters that don't really need there own section because of their brief explanations.Sharpen - These effects quite simply sharpen a pictures pixel rate, causing a crisper picture. It works pretty well, but not always, if you have a slightly blurry picture try this out using SHARPEN or SHARPEN MORE, be careful because to much sharpening will cause heavy pixelation.
Noise - By adding noise you are creating a ton of pixels of different colors, or monochromatic noise which is black and white.
Pixelate - Effects that do what they say...pixelate. Things like MOSAIC will create that blur effect they have on cops and effects like CRYSTALLIZE will give it a stained glass window effect.
Stylize - Most of these effects will fully transform your whole picture, like EMBOSS will give it your picture that stone sculpture look. I don't use these that often but every once and a while I do use WIND, to give it that high exposure motion look.