Some of Photoshop’s filters, such as Reduce Noise and Smart Sharpen, are unequivocally utilitarian. Others, including Plastic Wrap and Stamp, are less so. With any luck, you’ll find the filters we cover in this hour to be the least useful of all—which should also make them some of the most fun to play with! We also look at three groups of filters:
Distort—. These filters alter the geometry of an image, twisting, folding, and, yes, even spindling your picture.
Pixelate—. Here you’ll find more than half a dozen different ways to break up your picture into tiny pieces.
Stylize—. The nine filters in this group represent various unrelated ways to modify an image; the submenu is really a catch-all for filters that just don’t seem to belong anywhere else.
Be sure to spend plenty of time trying out different settings with each of these filters; more than any others, they depend on the numbers you give them to determine their final effects. Without a doubt, the hours you spend working with the funky filters we’re about to look at will be some of the least productive time you’ll spend in Photoshop—and some of the most enjoyable.
To distort an image is to bend, twist, or stretch an image, sometimes until it’s unrecognizable. That’s what you’ll get from this first group of filters, for sure. You can melt your picture, twirl it around, or even turn it inside out. We’ll try out all these modifications on the image shown in Figure 17.1, which shows a crab-steaming business’s truck in Baltimore.
Oddly, the very first Distort filter doesn’t actually distort an image. Instead, it adds a foggy glow in the Background color in the lighter areas of a picture. I think this is another case of Photoshop’s designers not having any other place to stick this filter; regardless, it’s pretty neat-looking when applied to the right image.
Diffuse Glow is one of three Distort filters that you can apply via the Filter Gallery, which I think is far superior to the old-style dialogs of filters such as Displace. Its settings include sliders for Graininess, Glow Amount, and Clear Amount. It’s usually simplest to start with Glow Amount and Clear Amount, and try to achieve a reasonable balance between the two. If you’re looking for a soft glow, keep the Graininess setting low, to avoid a somewhat speckled look. In Figure 17.2, I set white as my Background color before applying the filter with a Graininess value of 2, a Glow Amount value of 9, and a Clear Amount value of 4 to turn a sunny Baltimore day into a foggy one. Using white as the glow color and a low Graininess setting gives you “fog”; more grain would make the picture look more like a snowstorm.
You can get a surreal effect by increasing the image’s saturation all the way up to 100% before you apply the glow. The result is somewhat posterized, more colorful, and definitely fantastical.
To apply the Displace filter, you need to have a displacement map, which works sort of like a texture map. To apply a displacement map, choose Filter, Distort, Displace and then set the Horizontal and Vertical Scale amounts, which can range from –999 to 999 and influence how much distortion is applied. The default value is 10, and you’ll generally want to stay fairly close to that. After you set these values and click OK, Photoshop asks you to choose a displacement map; you can use any Photoshop-format file as a displacement map. The effect the Displace filter produces depends entirely on which map you choose. One common use of Displace is to wrap text or a flat image snugly to the contours of an image below. In Figure 17.3, you can see the displacement map I used to map the truck image onto a cobblestone layer below it (shown in Figure 17.4). I made the displacement map by duplicating the cobblestone layer, converting it to grayscale, posterizing it to three brightness levels, and then blurring it to smooth it out.
The Glass and Ocean Ripple filters can have similar effects on an image; they both create displacements that make the image appear to be viewed through textured glass or moving water.
The Glass filter (see Figure 17.5) features a choice of glass texture, including Frosted, Tiny Lens, or Canvas. If you prefer, you can load a texture of your own instead; just choose Load Texture from the pop-up menu at the bottom of the dialog and open any Photoshop-format file.
Use the Smoothness slider to reduce the angularity of the effect. Keeping the Distortion value low and the Smoothness value high creates a subtle effect; the opposite gives you much more distortion. The Scaling slider adjusts the scale of the distortion relative to the image itself, from 50% to 200%. The Invert button at the bottom of the dialog replaces the light areas of the texture with dark areas and vice versa, making low areas appear high and high areas appear low.
The Ocean Ripple filter is quite similar to Glass; it makes your image appear to be under water (see Figure 17.6). This filter is easier to use than the Glass filter because it has only two sliders: Ripple Size and Ripple Magnitude. The former determines how big the ripples are relative to the image, and the latter controls how many ripples are applied.
The Pinch, Spherize, and ZigZag have very similar interfaces. Figure 17.7 shows the dialog for the ZigZag filter, which features a gridlined proxy that shows you the true shape of the zigs and zags you’re applying to the image with this filter. The Pinch and Spherize dialogs also make use of a grid proxy to show you their geometry.
The Amount slider controls the size of the ripples, and the Ridges value determines how many waves are applied to the picture. Choose a Style option to change the shape of the overall ripple pattern (see Figure 17.8 to see the results of the settings shown in Figure 17.7).
Although their interfaces are similar to that of the ZigZag filter, Spherize and Pinch produce a completely different type of distortion. When you apply Spherize, Photoshop creates an elliptical bulge in the middle of the image, with the size of the bulge controlled by the Amount Slider. The Mode pop-up menu contains Normal, Horizontal Only, and Vertical Only options, with the latter two restricting the bulge to the specified dimension. Pinch does almost the same thing as Spherize, except that it pulls the image inward instead of bowing it outward. It doesn’t have a Mode menu—only an Amount slider.
This filter takes its name from an engineering term referring to horizontal stress on an object. As you might expect, it warps images horizontally, in relation to the vertical line shown in the Shear dialog (see Figure 17.9). The preview area shows the effect of your changes to the line. Note that not only can you drag the line’s top and bottom points to angle it, but you can also add more control points on the curve by clicking it. You can drag each control point independently to redirect the motion of the curve.
Figure 17.10 shows the results of the Shear filter. I’ve set the image to Repeat Edge Pixels, so it looks as if the warping left a smudge of pixels behind.
If you want your picture to be swirling down the drain, a quick application of the Twirl filter will fulfill your desire. There’s just one control to worry about: an Angle slider that ranges from –999° to 999°. Drag the slider to twirl the picture a little or a lot; the grid proxy next to the slider gives you an idea of what the filter’s geometry actually looks like. Take a look at Figure 17.11 to see what –394° of twirling does to the truck picture.
Pixelation happens when similarly colored pixels within an image are clumped together to form larger units, which can be square (like the pixels from which they’re formed), rounded, or polygonal. You’ll see pixelation when you print a picture at too low a resolution; the too-large pixels form angular, blocky shapes. And in traditional art, you’ve seen pixelation whenever you’ve looked at a mosaic or a Pointillist painting.
Photoshop’s Pixelate filters work best on simple subjects and images with strong contrast, such as the photo of workers hosing down a baseball field in Figure 17.12.
When a color photo is processed for printing, it’s turned into a collection of variably sized dots, each colored cyan, magenta, yellow, or black. The size of the dot and the corresponding amount of whitespace around it determines the apparent intensity of the color at that point in the image, and colors other than cyan, magenta, yellow, and black are simulated by clustering together different-colored dots to fool the eye. This kind of image is called a halftone; if you look at a magazine ad or the photos in this book using a magnifying glass, you’ll be able to see the images’ halftone dots.
Now that you know much more than you ever expected to about color printing processes, let’s take a look at the Color Halftone filter. You guessed it—this filter turns your image into a color halftone, generally with much larger dots than you’re actually likely to see anywhere other than on the side of an 18-wheeler (see Figure 17.13). You’ve probably seen a similar effect used in Pop Art images such as paintings by 20-century painter Roy Lichtenstein. The Color Halftone filter isn’t needed to prepare images for printing, but it can give your pictures a fun sort of quirky, retro look. Its dialog enables you to control the maximum diameter of the dots, as well as the angle at which each of the four colors of dots is applied to the image.
Most of the Pixelate filters look best if the effect is applied using a rather small Cell Size. Otherwise, the clumps of color, whatever their shape, are so big that the image is unrecognizable. In Figure 17.14, I applied the Crystallize filter with a Cell Size of 8. This setting adds an interesting amount distortion without obscuring the basic forms in the image. In Figure 17.15, I pushed the Cell Size up to 50, completely destroying the picture. You can set the Cell Size as high as 300, but doing that might turn the entire picture into just one or two cells, depending on the image’s resolution. An extremely hi-res image might require a Cell Size in the hundreds; the picture I’m using here is only 800 pixels by 600 pixels, so a value that high would divide it into just a dozen or so cells.
In my opinion, neither of these two filters is much to speak of. Neither has a dialog, and their effects don’t seem particularly attractive or useful to me. You, on the other hand, might love them—so, by all means, give them a try.
As with the rest of the Pixelate filters, the Facet filter clumps like-colored pixels together into faceted shapes. The problem is that it does so on such a tiny level that the effect is nearly impossible to see. This filter would be much more usable if you could control the clumps’ size.
Fragment, on the other hand, is rather unusual for a Pixelate filter: It doesn’t create clumps; instead, it gives your image a really (really!) bad case of camera shake, turning each object into four ghostly copies of itself, each slightly offset from the others. If you come up with a good use for this one, please do email me and tell me all about it!
In this venerable print-making method, a copper printing plate is roughened more in areas of darker color, less in areas of lighter color, and not at all in areas that are to print white. The roughening process produces tiny pits in the metal that hold on to the ink and then deposit it onto the paper. Photoshop’s Mezzotint filter converts your image to a random pattern of dots or lines (choose a pattern from the filter dialog’s Type pop-up menu, its only control) and bumps up the saturation all the way (see Figure 17.16).
The Pixelate filters include a couple more real-life media analogs: Mosaic and Pointillize. The former is supposed to create an analog of tile mosaics. In reality, though, it works similarly to Facet, except that it makes larger “pixels” out of the original smaller ones because it produces only square clumps. The result is the sort of thing used to hide the faces of the people who refused to sign the release forms on all those reality shows (see Figure 17.17).
The Pointillize filter, on the other hand, can look quite convincing. Comparing the work of Georges Seurat to that of some of the “sloppier” French impressionists can be quite a revelation. Seurat’s dabs of paint, all neatly clustered, form elegant scenes from a distance and form equally elegant abstract patterns up close. This is the effect that Photoshop’s Pointillize filter is going for, with varying results.
The key to making the Pointillize filter work is choosing the right Dot Size value for your picture; expect to do some experimentation. You might have to use a larger value than you expect, to distinguish dots of “paint” from image noise or film grain. The example in Figure 17.18 was created with a Cell Size value of 5 pixels. A neat twist is that Photoshop uses the current Foreground and Background colors to create the dots; you won’t notice this if you stick to the defaults of black and white, but the effect gives an interesting color cast if you choose other colors.
To stylize something is to give it a distinctive style that’s often clearly artificial. That’s what the Stylize filters are all about. These nine filters provide a wide variety of different looks that don’t replicate natural media and don’t attempt to look like anything but what they are: the result of funky Photoshop filters. We’ll take a look at these filters applied to this dramatic photo of a cathedral (see Figure 17.19).
First up in the Stylize submenu is the Diffuse filter, which can lend a soft appearance to an image that’s subtly different from a blur. The only problem is that you can’t control its radius, so on high-resolution images, it tends to be pretty much invisible. The filter actually rearranges pixels with a view toward softening the focus, in one of four different ways:
Normal shuffles pixels completely randomly within the filter’s limited radius.
Darken Only replaces light pixels with darker ones, diffusing the image and darkening it at the same time.
Lighten Only replaces dark pixels with lighter ones, lightening the image as it diffuses it.
Anisotropic shuffles pixels so that there’s the smallest possible amount of color shift, which results in a much smoother effect.
As with Facet, Diffuse is hard to see in high-resolution images (see Figure 17.20). To get a more pronounced effect, sometimes I reduce the image’s resolution, apply the Diffuse filter, and then resample the image back to its original resolution (see Figure 17.21).
The Emboss filter doesn’t do much for most photos. It turns an image into a bas relief, although not as well as the Bas Relief filter does. In the process, the Emboss filter also converts most of the image to medium gray. The Emboss filter has only three options: Shadow Angle, Height, and Amount. Figure 17.22 shows our church image after the Emboss filter has been applied, with an Angle of 135°, a Height value of 8 pixels, and an Amount value of 100%.
A better way to use the Emboss filter is on a duplicate layer with a different blending mode or Opacity value (see Figure 17.23). In the example shown here, I duplicated the Background layer and applied the Emboss filter to the copy using the same settings as I did to create Figure 17.22. Then I changed the embossed layer’s blending mode to Overlay.
If you’re into faux 3-D effects, you’ll just love the Extrude filter. It breaks up a picture into simulated cubes or pyramids of varying apparent height, based either on the brightness level of that area of the image or on a random distribution. You can set the size of the cubes or pyramids as well as their average height. It’s...interesting (see Figure 17.24).
These three effects sound as if they should look alike, and they do—to an extent—simply because they all locate edges within an image and outline them in some way. I definitely count them in the category of filters I like to combine with other filters, just to see what happens.
The first of the three, Find Edges, removes most of the colors from the object and replaces them with a line around each edge contour. The color of the lines depends on the value at that point on the original object, with the lightest points in yellow and the darkest points in purple. The picture looks like a rather delicate-colored pencil drawing. Find Edges works best, naturally, on photos that have a lot of detail for the filter to find. In Figure 17.25, I’ve applied it to the cathedral image.
Find Edges becomes darker and more intense if you apply it multiple times to the same picture. If you don’t like the result of a single application, try it again before you move on to a different filter, or undo and then increase the contrast in the original photo before you reapply the filter. You can also touch up areas afterward with the Sponge tool, to bring out colors you hardly knew were there. And I find that if I pump up both the vibrance and the contrast in a picture before applying Find Edges, the result retains more detail and has more robust color.
Unfortunately, you can’t set the sensitivity of the Find Edges filter; there are no controls. You can prepare the picture before you trace it, however, to try to improve your results. Start by running the Despeckle filter (choose Filter, Noise, Despeckle) so that Photoshop won’t attempt to outline every piece of dust in the picture. If you don’t want the background to show, select and delete it, or select your object and copy it to a new layer (choose Layer, New, Layer Via Copy to do this in a single step). After applying Find Edges, you can also choose Edit, Fade to back off the strength of the filter. Using this filter on duplicate layers with different blending modes can produce some spectacular effects, too.
Glowing Edges is even more fun because it’s prettier (at least, I think so) and because you can adjust it to have maximum impact on your specific picture. Glowing Edges draws brightly colored lines along areas of color transition, against a black background. The effect is more than a little reminiscent of neon signs. In the Glowing Edges dialog (which is the only Stylize filter dialog in the Filter Gallery), you can vary the intensity of the color and the thickness of the lines.
In Figure 17.26, I’ve applied Glowing Edges to the church picture again. This filter works especially well with busy pictures that contain a lot of edges. The more it has to work with, the greater impact the filter has.
Similar to several of the filters we’ve talked about in this hour, Trace Contour sometimes benefits from being applied several times (see Figure 17.27). The Trace Contour dialog features a slider that controls the level at which brightness value differences are translated into contour lines, much like those you see on geological survey maps. Drag the slider to set the threshold at which the values (from 0 to 255) are traced. Experiment to see which values bring out the best detail in your image; this varies a lot in different pictures. The Edge option in the Trace Contour dialog determines how Photoshop uses the Level value, Lower outlines areas in which the color values of pixels fall below the specified level, and Upper outlines areas where the values of the pixels are greater than the specified level.
Here’s another filter that doesn’t have any options for you to set; just choose Filter, Stylize, Solarize and go! The result combines a negative version with the original positive version of the image (see Figure 17.28). Again, you can manipulate the results of this filter, but you need to do it by altering the image before applying the filter. Try experimenting with different contrast, brightness, and saturation settings.
If you’ve been longing for a way to cut up your picture into squares and then shuffle them just a bit so you can see gaps between them, this is a great day. That’s exactly what the Tiles filter does, and it gives you four choices of what can go in the gaps between tiles: the Background color, the Foreground color, an inverted version of the image, or slices of the original image itself. Used on its own, Tiles isn’t very interesting. Combined with, say, Diffuse and Emboss, it might be just what you need.
The Wind filter creates a directional blur that’s intended to evoke, you guessed it, wind. You can control the Direction (From the Left or From the Right) and the intensity of the wind effect (Wind, Blast, or Stagger) in the filter’s dialog (see Figure 17.29). This is a great filter for creating the illusion of movement and for applying to type. It works best when applied to a selected area instead of to the entire picture. When I was working on a previous edition of this book, one of the editors told me, “My favorite Wind filter effect is making a brushed metal look by adding noise to the basic metal color and then hitting it with wind from both directions, followed by a bit of tweaking for the perfect illusion.” Thanks for the tip, Jon!
This hour has been devoted the Distort, Pixelate, and Stylize filters. They’re not for everyone—and they’re certainly not for every image—but they’re fun to play with and can occasionally create some unusual and beautiful effects. Don’t hesitate to apply a second and even third filter over the first; often the second filter or a second application of the original filter can make a real difference, and you can always undo if you don’t like the results.
And now, here’s one final reminder to keep experimenting. You never know what a filter or combination can do to a particular picture until you try it, even if you’ve used that filter extensively with a different image. The criteria on which Photoshop bases the effects of its filters means that some filters can look very different, according to the kind of picture to which they are applied. You can’t always predict what will happen, but that’s what makes it fun.
Start with one of the pictures used in this hour—
pots.jpg,sidedoor.jpg, andsteps.jpgare all available for download on the book’s website—and apply filters one after another until you can’t recognize the image. See how many filters you can stack up before the picture completely disappears.Go back to the original picture save a copy to preserve the original, and apply the Find Edges filter. This should give you an interesting image. Save it. Try the other filters over it until you find at least three that work well with the Find Edges filter. Whenever you have time, repeat this exercise, starting with a different filter.