ADOBE PHOTOSHOP - FILTER MENU

Welcome to my Blog explaining every filter in PHOTOSHOP. 

Here I'm going to take you through the FILTER menu and show you what each folder does step by step with examples. So, I've got a photo open and you'll notice a lot of times when you open a photo it's like locked as the background layer. One concept that's really good to know in Photoshop is the concept of smart filters. So, if you ever go to Filter, Convert for Smart Filters.

You'll notice that it'll turn your layer into a smart object which you can also always just right click and convert to a smart object as well.

but now if I ever add a filter on it so let's just say I add a Blur - Gaussian blur. If I ever add a filter on to that you'll see that all of my filters are under the smart filter section.

So, I can add other things as well like I can add distortions maybe and you'll see they all kind of stack up and arrange and I can rearrange them. Let's say I wanted the ripple first or the blur first and you can also double click on any of these sliders and adjust the strength and opacity of the filter and even the blending mode of the filter.

In this way you can go back and forth and you can hide stuff without destroying your original photo and also it gives you a layer mask to work with. Let's say I only wanted all of those effects to appear on the left half of my photo. I can go to a black and white gradient and make sure I have that smart filter, white mask selected and if I add that black and white gradient. You'll see everything that's black disappears and everything that's white gets filtered and that's just how layer masks work on any layer. In this way you have tons of flexibility all on one layer without even destroying or altering the original photo.

you can also use your previously used filter by clicking on the recent filter option "the first one in the list".

You don't have to undo a bunch of stuff if you want to go back to some other things. In the filter gallery you have your folders of filters so all the standard blurs, distortions, sharpens but you also have a few things. Some of these are like their own plugins and their own whole menus such as the camera raw filter. This is like if you ever open a photo that was shot in RAW format on your camera it'll allow you to adjust the exposure, contrast, highlights and all that so it's kind of like its own little menu and you also have the lens correction and adaptive wide-angle some more lens corrective type things and then liquify is its own whole thing as well. You have all the different liquification tools where you can smudge and liquify your photo and lastly you have the filter gallery. So, this is where they've kind of thrown in a bunch of the artistic type of folders all in this gallery and a lot of these are pretty self-explanatory visually but I'll explain each of them step by step below. So, we should first start with Filter Gallery.

1.  FILTER GALLERY:

We are going to be taking a look at the filter gallery starting with the artistic filters. I have chosen a portrait photo for this specifically.

You always have the option to do a few different adjustments so number of levels I could choose from 1 to all the way up to 8 and I'll slowly add more and more layers of color however if I keep with something simplistic like 5. I almost get a cool pop art effect without even doing much work.

This could be great for poster designs, flyer designs and all different kind of things where it looks like this might have taken a lot more work than it is but I just had a good starting photo with a clean background and applied a simple artistic filter onto it. Another thing with the filter gallery is that I can always stack effects on top of each other so I could have this cutout effect and then I can hit the plus button in bottom right corner for a new effect layer and I could choose like a film grain as well I could do two filter gallery effects on top of each other and the order in which they're here is the order in which they're applied  top to bottom, so if I take that film grain and actually put it below the cutout now I get a different effect going on because the cutout is happening after the film grain so in this way we could stack multiple effects.

In that way it's a little different than the ones that are individually in the folders but I can still blend and change the opacity if it is a smart filter and if you ever double click that filter gallery I can go back and hide delete or rearrange effects. Its own little distort folder with different kinds of distortions especially like this glass distortion can be interesting even for photos or text or whatever add some glass distortion and refraction and rippling do ocean rippling and there's also sketch which will turn your photo black and white.

One really good in here is the halftone pattern. You can see, this can be useful to almost get like that comic book texture or those halftone dots and it turns everything black and white and remember you can always press ok on these and then go on to add further adjustments like if I did do this black and white thing and then added a gradient map.

2.  3D FILTER:

Now we're going to be taking a look at the 3d filters. So, this gets a little bit out of the scope of Photoshop but Photoshop does have the ability to generate different types of 3d maps known as bump Maps or normal Maps.

So, if I'm working with a texture such as a photo of a brick wall and I press generate bump or height map you'll see it'll open up some of these 3d menus that are available in Photoshop and we could see what this textured photo might look like applied onto different 3d objects like a sphere or a cube. So the basic idea of it is it's taking the luminance values or like the darkness and the lightness to find contrast in the photo and generate differences in height where it's lighter that's such as the white and black where it's darker that's where it'll raise or lower the surface as a texture so within this menu I can choose different ways to preview it however this would only be for if you're going to actually take this and save it as a texture and then apply it later in some 3d rendering program this is common in like 3d software's or video game production uses flat textures such as these to map them over surfaces. You can also see what this might look like with different types of lighting just for example and you can rotate around and spin around these objects now when I press ok this isn't actually going to generate a cube or a pyramid or anything like that it just has generated our height map or a bump map and with this, we can go to the 3d layer section and we could push things like 3d extrusions or creating a mesh from the depth map.

So, if I press create it'll apply this height map and you can see it's kind of extruded things out based on the luminance the lightness and the darkness textures if I scale it along the z-axis, I can make this brick wall maybe just a little bit textured and if I rotate this around you can see it's not anymore just a flat object there's a little bit of texture to it now. We've created this 3d object on our composition and we can move it around wherever you want but I can go and add further layers on top of that so I can add different layers whatever I want really under or behind this or with this and within this 3d menu you can also generate shapes and different things like that that will appear as their own layer as well so you could create 3d shapes in this way and move around 3d cameras however if we revert back to our original photo when you do create these 3d bump maps or normal Maps. You can always adjust some things about them like the amount of contrast or the blur and you can just use these as textures you could save them as PNG s or depending on the 3d software that you're working in. Whatever file type that it prefers and you could load them into your 3d software’s and apply these textures onto whatever surfaces and shapes you create in those programs.

The other 3d option you have is the normal map so instead of working with luminance values this one works more with the red green blue or just the different color values and but you have the same kind of idea once you create this as a texture either save it as a PNG and then load it into other programs and use it as a normal map a lot of these programs will accept normal map textures and apply them onto surfaces as we saw in the previews or you can use it right within Photoshop but this is just a very brief introduction to some of the 3d features that are available in Photoshop.

3.  BLUR:

we're going to be taking a look at the blur filters now. This is how we can blur our images and I'm going to be in order. These are just alphabetically listed but our standard go-to is usually just going to be the Gaussian blur.

This is a simple way to blur that just allows us to choose a radius amount. So, this is kind of like the strength all the way from 0 to 1000 and you can see all the strengths in between. We just get a general blurring of all. Its mathematical the Gaussian. The term Gaussian is just the name of a mathematician. A lot of editing in general has to do with math but that's beside the point it's basically blurring these pixels based on a certain algorithm and remember whenever we're working with smart filters.

So, if I convert this to a smart object like I showed in the first paragraph and let's say I applied that same blur in this case we have the smart filter so I can always uncheck it.

I can go back and double click it and adjust the blending amounts of it so if I just put that at 50% opacity now we get this kind of dreamy hazy blur because it's half and half mixed with the original you can even put that on blending modes to get different types of hazy looks but there's a lot you can do with smart filters and layer masks regardless of the layer such as just blurring with gradients or 1/2 that's a really simple but cool-looking technique right there next up just going down the list again we have average.

So average is an interesting one, it takes all of the pixels in the image and then adds them all together and just finds the average color and makes your entire image that color which can come in handy in lots of different situations.

You can see how average is just blending everything and just picking one color out of it which can be cool and remember you can even do let's say you're trying to get a color palette out of an image if I just get the average out of this section using the rectangular marquee tool I can blur that to an average and then if I right-click select inverse and do this section you see we get different averages so that's one idea how you can use it to make color palettes and stuff out of sections but you know there's never one right way to use stuff in Photoshop. These tools are all just there for you.

• Another blur we have is just blur now. This is a very subtle blur you see if I zoom in real far if I add just the blur you can see it just barely adds a tad of blur it's kind of like the opposite of the filter sharpen effect.

• Another one is blur more it's just like blur but a little bit more and you can see the more I keep repeating that over and over even if I use that shortcut ctrl + alt + F and do it a bunch of times. we just get a bit blurrier each time.

• Now the next one we have is box blur this one as the name suggests instead of like the Gaussian blur was just a smooth blur this one will blur more in square type of shapes or box shapes and you can see that separation happening how it's splitting each corner.

• Now lens blur is grayed out right now but if I rasterize this layer again and go to lens blur, I should be able to select it and what lens blur does similar kind of to the Box blur is. It allows us to blur as if it was a real camera lens and get some of that bouquet look so it opens up its own little panel here and you can choose the blur amount and the Irish shape so let's just say I increase that a lot and I can do like a triangle for example and if I increase the focal distance,

you can see now, we're getting an entirely triangle bokeh image you even have some options on these specular highlights.

So, you can see if I adjust the threshold and brightness, I can make some of those white lights appear a lot whiter so you can change the shape to be whatever you want I can do triangle square or more just like traditional circular types of shapes and you could use layer masks as well to perhaps add a lens blur onto the image but then if I added a layer mask here, I could make the foreground maybe not blurry.

• Another really useful one when you don't just want a general blur and you want a directional blur is motion blur so this one allows you to blur with an emotion.

 

This is going to be really cool to add motion to an image or even to stylize text or shapes and you can make it go any direction you want similar to that is radial blur except in this case instead of going on one angle we're going circular or zoom so it's you don't get the same type of menu but you can actually choose the blur Center as well by dragging around this point and the amount strength and then you can choose spin or zoom and when you press OK.

You'll see that it will spin around whatever center point you chose so that's a bit strong but we have a circular blur there if I edit undo that I can try to show you what a zoom might look like. Let's say it'll lower strength in this case we have the zoom blur there which also creates some pretty cool results that you couldn't get with just like a motion blur.

• Another one similar to the box blur is shape blur so not only can you blur in a box but any one of the shapes that's loaded in your custom shape menu which is this tool right here you can choose to blur with. So, if for some reason I wanted to blur in the shape of a right arrow I can try to apply that and it will kind of blur things with that shape in mind. If I want to blur in the shape of a fish, I can try to do that and you might see that that shape being used so it just affects the way that the pixels are kind of separated apart.

Lastly, we have smart blur and surface blur so smart blur tries to keep the edges of the shape in mind however it blurs things within it. 

So, if I increase the radius a bunch I can also adjust the threshold based to say what edge should be considered the lower the more edges higher the threshold the more stuff will fall into the blur but I can increase the amount of blur there and if I press okay you'll see it's different from your traditional blur all the edges kind of stay how they were except it almost takes on this painterly type of quality not only necessarily could this be used for this painterly effect but if you wanted to smooth skin out a little bit or just smooth the insides of whatever shape or what's in your photo this could be a way to just smooth up the surfaces without having to mess up the edges like a Gaussian blur would do. 

• Another one similar to that is the surface blur. So again, this is trying to blur the surfaces of the image but you can adjust the threshold of what is being actually considered an edge or not. So, the lower the threshold the more it's trying to retain that edge. 

So, that's a very brief introduction about explanation of all the different blurs available in Photoshop. I hope you find this useful.