Ah, filters! They offer the Photoshop user the most bang for the buck, that’s for sure. With a filter, you can instantly turn a blurry picture into a faux oil painting, create fluffy clouds from thin air, or remove dust and scratches from an old photo. And there’s more—oh, so much more.
But before you go wild with filters in the next few hours, I’d like you to take just one hour to learn a few things that will make your filter adventures even wilder and woollier. Did you know, for example, that you can apply more than one filter at a time using the Filter Gallery? Or that you can make any filter a Smart Filter whose settings you can adjust at any point after you apply it—yes, even years later? When you master these techniques, in addition to the Fade command, you’ll be ready to move on to actually applying some filters. So hang in there.
If you’ve skipped ahead and applied some of Photoshop’s more artistic filters, you’ve already met the Filter Gallery (see Figure 14.1). This very large—but resizable—dialog houses the Artistic, Brush Strokes, Distort, Sketch, Stylize, and Texture groups of filters. If you take advantage of all this dialog has to offer, you’ll find that you have more control over these filters and their limitless possibilities than you ever imagined. Let’s take a quick tour.
Tip: It’s All Your Default
If you press Option (Mac) or Ctrl (Windows) while working in the Filter Gallery, the Cancel button changes to a Default button. Click Default to insert the settings that Photoshop’s developers think are likely to work for most images. Don’t feel as though you have to use the default settings, though—they’re just a useful starting point.
The Filter Gallery’s first, and most obvious, advantage over other dialogs is its huge preview area. Although you can’t resize the preview area itself, you can make it larger by enlarging the whole Filter Gallery dialog or by simply hiding the column of thumbnails. Zoom controls in the lower-left corner of the preview area enable you to change its view percentage so that you can focus on details as you experiment with filters.
Next to the preview area is a list of filter groups; clicking one displays all the filters in that group. This gives you access to 47 filters in a single dialog—how’s that for efficiency? In addition, each filter name is accompanied by a small thumbnail showing you the results of applying that filter to a sample image. If you don’t need to see the thumbnails and filter group labels, you can hide this list by clicking the inverted triangle to the right of the list.
Moving farther right again, you’ll notice the filter settings area under the OK and Cancel buttons. The controls you see here, of course, vary depending on which filter you’re currently working with. At the top of the settings area is a pop-up menu that lists all the filters in the Gallery; this is how you switch filters if you’ve hidden the filter list to enlarge your preview area.
Below the settings area is another list that looks similar to the Layers panel. Here, in the effect layers list, is where things get really interesting. When you click a filter name, a new entry appears in the list, complete with an eye icon that you can click to hide the filter’s effects. At the bottom of the list are two familiar-looking buttons: a trash button that removes the filter and its effects, and a New Effect Layer button that enables you to add another filter on top of the first one. Using this list, you can create combinations of filters and settings in literally infinite numbers.
To see and change the settings of an effect layer, click its entry in the effect layers list, or click and drag an effect layer to change its stacking order. Be sure to experiment with these capabilities—the possibilities are endless (see Figure 14.2).
Now that you’ve been wowed by the power of the Filter Gallery, prepare to be wowed some more. Smart Filters, first introduced in Photoshop CS3, are one of the coolest features to be added to Photoshop in a very long time. And they’re not even new filters; they’re simply a new way of using the filters that have been in Photoshop all along.
Smart Filters have elements in common with adjustment layers, which you learned about in Hour 5, “Adjusting Brightness and Color,” and with layer styles, which we covered in Hour 11, “Creating Layered Images.” After you apply a Smart Filter to a layer, you can return to that filter’s dialog at any time and change its settings.
You can apply as many Smart Filters to each layer as you like. They’re displayed in the Layers panel under the layer’s name, just the way layer styles are (see Figure 14.3). Applying Smart Filters works just like applying regular filters, with one difference: You must first convert the layer you’re working with to a Smart Object. To do that, choose Filter, Convert for Smart Filters. Then choose the filter you want to apply from the Filter menu—any of Photoshop’s native filters other than the Liquify or Vanishing Point filters, and any of your third-party filters that have been updated to work as Smart Filters.
You can turn any existing layer into a Smart Object (choose either Layer, Smart Objects, Convert to Smart Object, or Filter, Convert for Smart Filters)—or you can place other files within your image as Smart Objects (choose File, Place). All the changes you make to a Smart Object are shown onscreen, but they’re not actually applied to the object until you output the image by printing it or saving it in a format other than Photoshop’s native format.
What’s the point? Using Smart Objects not only gives you greater creative freedom (because you can change your mind repeatedly), but also improves the quality of your images. For example, suppose you use the Transform, Scale command to shrink an object within an image but then later you change your mind. If you scale it back up to its original size, you’ll have a fuzzy image that’s nowhere near as sharp and detailed as the original, because the original pixels were deleted when the object was scaled down. However, if you convert that layer to a Smart Object before scaling it down, you can rescale it as many times as you want without loss of quality.
As a bonus, if you duplicate a Smart Object’s layer, the copy of the object remains linked to the original version of the object, and any changes made to either one are also applied to the linked Smart Object.
What can you do with a Smart Object? You can scale, rotate, or warp it. You can change its layer blending mode or opacity, apply a layer style to it, and, of course, apply filters to it.
And what can’t you do with a Smart Object? You can’t erase it, smudge it, or paint over it. If you try, Photoshop asks you if you want to rasterize the Smart Object, which means turning it back into a regular layer.
Here are some of the cool things you can do with Smart Filters after you’ve applied them:
Change filter settings by double-clicking a Smart Filter’s entry in the Layers panel to return to the filter’s dialog.
Click the eye icon next to a Smart Filter or a group of Smart Filters to hide the filter effects or to show them again when they’re hidden.
To change the stacking order of Smart Filters, drag their entries in the Layers panel. This changes the way they affect the image, so be sure to try different combinations.
To copy a Smart Filter to another Smart Object, press Option (Mac) or Alt (Windows) and drag the filter’s entry over the Smart Object’s entry. If you want to copy all the Smart Filters from a layer, Option-drag or Alt-drag the “Smart Filters” line itself.
Block the effects of a Smart Filter or group of Smart Filters on parts of a layer by editing the layer’s filter mask. Filter masks work just like the masks associated with adjustment layers (see Hour 5). Wherever the mask is black, the effect of the filter is eliminated, and where it’s white, the effect shows. Gray areas let the effect show partially. To edit a filter mask, click its icon (next to the Smart Filters entry in the Layer panel) and paint with black, white, or gray (see Figure 14.4).
By now, you’ve probably realized that there’s much more to using a filter in Photoshop than simply applying the filter to your picture. You can try different settings, you can go back and change those settings, and you can combine filters to create whole new effects, as well as change the opacity of filter effects after you’ve applied them.
You don’t have to be satisfied with a single filter; I rarely am. The coolest filter effects are achieved by stacking multiple filters on top of one another. That’s one of the reasons Adobe invented the Filter Gallery and Smart Filters, as well as the History panel. These features enable you to experiment as much as you want without worrying about doing permanent damage to your image. And you’ll find that if using one filter is great, using two filters (or more!) is even better. Take a look at Figure 14.5, for example. It shows the before version and two after versions of the same photo; I could have applied millions more combinations of filters to this image, to achieve millions more different effects.
The Fade command (Edit, Fade [last filter or adjustment]) fades the effect of the filter or adjustment by reducing its opacity, using a percentage setting ranging from 0% to 100%. You might think that this would have the same result as simply using lower settings in the filter’s original dialog—but you’d be wrong. Using Fade gives you a completely different result from lowering the settings in the original filter or adjustment dialog. (Note that the Fade command doesn’t work with Smart Filters.)
Take a look at the example in Figure 14.6. I applied the Crystallize filter with a Cell Size of 15 to the paw print on the left. Then I selected the other paw print and applied the same filter with the Cell Size doubled, to 30. Finally, I chose Edit, Fade Crystallize and entered an Opacity of 50%. You can see that the effect of the filter isn’t halved by the Fade command; instead, it’s as though Photoshop duplicated the original paw print, dropped it under the new Crystallized paw print, and set them both to 50% opacity.
During this hour, you experienced the wonders of filters, in preparation for learning about the filters themselves. You explored the Filter Gallery, which enables you to experiment with combining filters and changing their settings before you actually apply them to your image. You learned about Smart Filters, which enable you to return to a filter dialog at any time to tweak your settings. And you learned about how filters can work together to produce a greater combined effect, as well as how to alter the intensity of a filter’s effect by using the Fade command.
With a colorful photo open, view the Filter Gallery by choosing any of the commands in the Artistic, Brush Strokes, Distort, Sketch, Stylize, or Texture submenus of the Filter menu. Choose a filter and tweak its settings, and then switch to a different filter. When you like the way your image looks, add another filter on top of the first one and experiment with its settings. After you’ve clicked OK to apply the filter, choose Edit, Fade. Drag the slider to reduce the opacity of the filter effects. Try different blending modes, too. You’ll go much further with the filters you’ll encounter in the next few hours if you’ve first mastered these tools for applying filters with maximum virtuosity.