Hour 14. Filters That Improve Your Picture

What You'll Learn in This Hour:

• Sharpen Filters

• Blur Filters

• Fading Filters

I'm not sure whether Photoshop's creators pioneered the idea of plug-in filters or just took the ball and ran with it. In either case, they've given us a wonderful tool for altering the all-over appearance of a picture. Some of Photoshop's filters are strange; some are beautiful; some are merely useful—it's this last group that we'll look at in this hour.

The title for this hour's lesson doesn't really tell the story. Presumably you wouldn't apply a filter that didn't improve your picture. What would be the point? It might be more correct to say that the filters we'll be looking at will fix common photographic problems.