10. Applying Filters and Special Effects

In this chapter, you’ll learn how to apply the dozens of image filters available in Photoshop Elements and the best ways to use layer styles and photo effects.

Digital photography has a lot of advantages over traditional film photography—no film processing costs, for one thing—but my favorite is the fact that once your pictures live inside a computer, you can do almost anything with them. If you want, you can make a series of photos look more consistent by applying the same filter to them. You can create an endless collection of abstract textures and backgrounds. And you don’t have to stick to showing the world the way it really is; you can go wild and portray things the way you’d like them to be. The Photoshop Elements filters and special effects are how you get there.

Filters manipulate your image in various ways to change its appearance. Layer styles are made up of filters applied automatically in predetermined ways to produce quick-and-easy special effects such as drop shadows, and photo effects are similar filter combinations that are usually applied to the entire image rather than just a single layer. Used by themselves or together, these techniques enable you to take your images way beyond the ordinary (see Figure 10.1).

Figure 10.1. Which is more interesting?

Applying Filters

When you don’t want to “play it straight” with your photo, whether you’re just having fun or trying to achieve an artistic effect, you can turn to the Photoshop Elements filters. They offer room for infinite creativity, even if you can’t draw or paint, and experimenting with different settings and combinations is much more fun than playing solitaire—and much more productive. Filters are all based on pure mathematics; each one manipulates the color, brightness, and position of every pixel in the image or selected area based on equations that are way too complicated for anyone other than mathematicians to understand. Fortunately, you don’t have to understand the math behind filters to use them on your pictures.

The filters available to you in Photoshop Elements are categorized in the Filter menu as follows:

• Correct Camera Distortion—This filter fixes image flaws due to camera design. It’s covered in Chapter 7, “Using Advanced Editing Techniques.”

• Adjustments—The filters in this group are related to the image adjustments you’ll find in the Enhance menu, which are covered in Chapters 6 and 7.

• Artistic—Using these filters, you can turn your photo into a simulated painting or other traditional artwork.

• Blur—Here’s where you’ll head when you want your picture, or part of it, to have a softer focus.

• Brush Strokes—This group of filters is designed specifically to emulate different painting techniques.

• Distort—When you want to change the geometry of your image, this group of filters can help.

• Noise—Whether you want to add noise or remove it, these filters will help.

• Pixelate—Usually pixelation is considered bad; that’s the technical term for a jaggy image. But these filters do it in interesting and artistic ways.

• Render—These filters enable you to create things like clouds and lighting effects out of thin air.

• Sketch—Turn your picture into a drawing with any of these filters.

• Stylize—This group of filters contains a variety of interesting effects, some artistic and some less so.

• Texture—Using these filters, you can simulate a wide variety of surface textures.

• Video—The Video filters address various technical problems in television production.

• Other—This collection of filters doesn’t contain the kitchen sink, but it has everything but; in other words, this is the miscellaneous category.

• Digimarc—Enables you to read a Digimarc watermark embedded in an image.

You can apply each of these filters by choosing it from the Filters menu, or in two other ways: the Effects panel and the Filter Gallery. The Effects panel (choose Effects from the Windows menu to display it) lists all of the available filters with thumbnails showing their effects, which is helpful if you’re not sure which filter you want to use. The Filter Gallery, available through the Filters menu, also offers a visual interface for applying filters, combining thumbnails in a large dialog with controls for filter settings and a large preview. Unfortunately, the Filter Gallery provides access only to the Artistic, Brush Stroke, Distort, Sketch, Stylize, and Texture groups of filters. For those filters, whether you choose them directly from the Filter menu, from the Effects panel, or in the Filter Gallery, you’ll end up in the Filter Gallery to choose specific settings for the filter. Of the other filters, some have their own options dialogs, which appear whether you use the Effects panel or the Filter menu, and others have no options and therefore take effect immediately. No matter which method you choose to apply a filter, it works the same way and has the same results.

LET ME TRY IT

Applying Filters

The different settings available for many filters mean that you can get completely different effects from two applications of the same filter. And, of course, you can apply more than one filter in succession. The opportunities for expression are only limited by your imagination—and the time you have available to play with filters. To get started, first choose the image layer you want to work on, and make a selection if you want to isolate the effects of the filter to a specific area. Then follow these steps to use the Filter menu:

1. Click the Filter menu and choose a submenu, then the filter you want to apply (see Figure 10.2).
   

   Figure 10.2. The filters in Photoshop Elements are grouped into logical categories.

   

   Filters with dialogs have ellipses (...) after their names in the Filter menu, like this: Mezzotint....

2. If you see a dialog, enter the settings you want to use for the filter. Use the preview option, if available, to see how your settings affect the picture. Feel free to experiment—you can always undo if you don’t like what you end up with.
3. If the dialog has a preview area, you can click + or − to zoom in or out, or click the zoom bar to enter a specific zoom percentage. Click and drag within the preview area to see a different part of the image, or click in the image window to center that part of the image in the preview area (see Figure 10.3). In the Filter Gallery, you have a couple of extra preview options. You can click the Show/Hide button at the top of the dialog to hide the thumbnails and give you a larger preview, and you can click the eye icon next to a filter to hide that effect in the preview area.
   

   Figure 10.3. The white square around the cursor indicates the area that will be visible in the preview when you click.

   

4. In the Filter Gallery—and here’s why you’re going to love the Filter Gallery—you can try out multiple filters successively or at the same time. To change the filter you’re currently applying, just click a different thumbnail and adjust the settings. Or, to apply another filter in combination with that one, click the New Effect Layer button at the bottom of the dialog and choose another filter. You can apply multiple instances of the same filter, and you can drag the effects layers up and down in the list to change the order in which they’re applied—which does change the resulting appearance of the image (see Figure 10.4). To remove a filter, click its name in the list of effects layers and click the Delete Effect Layer button next to the New Effect Layer button.
   

   Figure 10.4. The colors and details in the image change drastically when you reorder the filters.

   

5. Click OK when you’ve finished to apply the filter or filters. Don’t forget, filters are only applied to the active layer and—if there’s a selection active—within the selected area. If you apply a filter and then don’t see the results, you probably have a tiny selection off in the corner of the image that you’ve forgotten about. Choose Deselect from the Select menu and try again.
6. After applying a filter, click the Undo button to remove its effects, or choose Fade from the Filters menu to reduce its effects by specifying an opacity percentage for the filter.

Taking a Look at the Filters

Let me just say right up front that we’re not going to look at all Photoshop Elements filters here. This section of the chapter should give you an idea of what’s available and encourage you to go exploring through the Filter menu yourself. Try them all, and then try them again with different settings. Have fun, and let your creativity loose.

That said, let’s see what’s in Photoshop Elements’ bag of filter tricks.

Useful Filters

These are the filters you apply to a picture to make it look better—not cooler, funkier, or more interesting, just more itself. The first group is categorized as Adjustments. In Photoshop itself, these commands appear in the Image menu, not the Filter menu. Three of these are what I think of as utility filters:

• Equalize comes in handy for lightening a dark scan. It remaps the grayscale values in the image so that the lightest color turns white, the darkest color turns black, and the rest of the colors are spread evenly between black and white.

• Invert reverses all the colors in the image, turning it into a negative of itself (see Figure 10.5). As this implies, it’s most useful for converting scanned negatives to positive images. (Be aware, though, that it does not compensate for the orange tint in the color film itself.)

Figure 10.5. This is what you get when you run the Invert filter on an image of a white toy car against a dark background.

• Photo Filter replicates the effects of the actual glass filters that are used on film cameras. I find them most useful for making images look warmer or cooler.

There are eight Blur filters, two of which are bound to get more use than any of the others: Gaussian Blur and Smart Blur. Gaussian Blur is a straightforward, uncomplicated filter that lets you determine exactly how much you want the image blurred. Smart Blur, on the other hand, while also pretty straightforward, is slightly more complicated, because it attempts to blur flat areas while preserving image detail. In addition to a Radius slider, which controls how much the picture is blurred, the Smart Blur dialog features a Threshold slider (see Figure 10.6), which determines how different in color two pixels must be to constitute an edge. With higher values, more edges are blurred. You’ll also see Quality and Mode pop-up menus in the dialog. Quality enables you to trade off accuracy for greater speed in applying the filter to very large images (so you’ll stick with Best Quality most of the time), and the Mode menu can show you the edges the filter has identified before you click OK to apply the blur.

Figure 10.6. The Threshold slider gives you great control over which image pixels are filtered by Smart Blur.

The other six Blur filters, although they have similar functions, either offer less control or are specialized kinds of blur that aren’t applicable in most situations:

• Blur, Blur More, and Average have no settings whatsoever. Each of these filters applies a preset amount of blurring—a little (Blur), a little more (Blur More), or the maximum amount possible (Average). Blur and Blur More can be useful when you don’t feel like messing around with different values, and Average is an interesting way to discover the average color of all a picture’s pixels (see Figure 10.7).

Figure 10.7. Not surprisingly, the color of this ferny photo when you average it turns out to be green.

• Surface Blur leaves strong lines alone and attempts to blur only the surfaces of objects, not their shapes. Its results look artificially smooth, so you wouldn’t generally use it on a whole picture. One way to use it for retouching portraits is to duplicate the original image on a new layer, apply Surface Blur to the new layer, and then reduce that layer’s opacity, so that it partially blocks wrinkles and other flaws, but doesn’t eliminate them completely. Radial Blur and Motion Blur each apply a blur directionally. With Radial Blur, the picture looks as though it’s spinning around its center (see Figure 10.8), and Motion Blur makes the picture look as though it’s moving up, down, or from one side to the other. These can be used—judiciously!—to make a picture look more dynamic.

Figure 10.8. The Radial Blur dialog doesn’t have a live preview, but the proxy shows you about how much blur you’ll get.

In the Noise category, we’ve already looked at Despeckle, Dust & Scratches, and Reduce Noise in Chapter 7, “Using Advanced Editing Techniques.” Median is another noise reduction filter that attempts to smooth out surfaces while retaining detail. It’s worth a try if Reduce Noise isn’t working the way you want it to. Add Noise, of course, is the opposite of all of these, and it forms the basis for many a special effect or background texture. You’ll be reading more about it later in this chapter.

Two useful filters make up the Video category. If you’re bringing in images from video, you may want to check out the De-interlace filter, which removes the horizontal scan lines that appear in video images. When you’re creating images to incorporate in videos, on the other hand, the NTSC Colors can reduce saturation on some colors (such as bright blue and red) to make them “TV-safe” so that they’ll reproduce correctly on a television screen.

In the Other category, you’ll find five filters, four of them more useful than the other. High Pass is great for reducing and refining detail before applying the Threshold command or filters such as Stamp. Maximum and Minimum can make edges and lines smaller and larger, respectively (I know, it’s not intuitive); I use them for adjusting masks and for adjusting line art that looks either too thready or too heavy (see Figure 10.9). Offset, just as you’d suspect, moves everything in the image over the specified distance, and it can wrap around to the other side of the picture if you want. It’s great for creating repeating patterns with no visible lines between the tiles.

Figure 10.9. Minimum is a handy fix for scanned signatures that look too light.

Custom, on the other hand, is a horse of a different color. This fifth filter in the Other category enables you to create your own filters by specifying how the brightness value of each pixel in the image should change relative to the pixels that surround it. (This kind of modification is called a convolution.) While I wouldn’t call it a particularly useful filter, it can be fun to play with, and if you come up with a set of numbers that produces a pleasing effect, you can save it and use it again on other images (see Figure 10.10).

Figure 10.10. Not a bad effect—clicking Save will enable me to use it on other images.

If your images make their way around the Internet and you want to safeguard your ownership of them, you can use the Digimarc plug-in, located at the bottom of the Filter menu, to embed a custom invisible watermark in each image file. The plug-in can also scan images you open in the Editor to see if they already contain watermarks.

Artistic Filters

The filters I think of as “artistic” are the ones that are intended to replicate, or at least bring to mind, traditional art techniques. These are found in the Filter Gallery—in fact, they were originally a third-party set of Photoshop plug-ins called Gallery Effects. When Adobe bought their developer, the plug-ins became part of Photoshop and then Photoshop Elements. They range from the obvious, such as Watercolor and Dry Brush, to the more unusual, including Plastic Wrap and Glowing Edges.

Much of the fun in using filters comes from combining them, and the artistic filters shouldn’t be an exception to that. True, most traditional artists wouldn’t combine watercolors with fresco (see Figure 10.11)—in fact, I don’t think that’s even possible—but you’re not a traditional artist, and you don’t have to operate the same way. You may also find that you get better results with some filters by fiddling with the image’s brightness, saturation, or both before applying them, or even blurring the picture first.

Figure 10.11. You can adjust settings for either filter before you apply them by clicking its name in the list.

I’m constantly amazed by the different results I can get by applying different filters to the same photo, or even the same filter with different settings. Take this shot of a little girl watching a parade, for example (see Figure 10.12). It’s a great candidate for filters because there are plenty of colors to work with and the filters’ results won’t obscure the strong lines or the focal point (the sunglasses). Time to open up the Filter Gallery (in the Filter menu) and try some different filters out.

Figure 10.12. Time to see what we can do for this photo with filters.

One place to start might be with the Cutout filter (located in the Artistic submenu), which reduces the number of colors and simplifies shapes to give the impression of an image produced from cut-out paper shapes, like old-fashioned silhouettes with a color twist. The example picture looks interesting with the Cutout filter applied, but not especially appealing (see Figure 10.13). I don’t like the way the shadows on the side of the head turned into a big clump of olive green. A way to deal with that would be to dodge the shadows before applying the filter—or we could just move on to another filter.

Figure 10.13. The Cutout filter isn’t really rocking my world here.

Another Artistic filter, Palette Knife, does much better than Cutout with this picture, emphasizing the shapes in the image without losing the bright colors (see Figure 10.14). For a more abstract, less detailed look, I made the Stroke Size fairly large while leaving the Softness value in the middle. A higher Stroke Detail value and a lower Stroke Size value would produce a more photorealistic image, but I’m heading in the other direction at the moment, away from realism.

Figure 10.14. The Stroke Size setting determines how blocky the “brushstrokes” appear.

Moving to the Brush Strokes category, I really like the Sumi-e effect on this image (see Figure 10.15). It’s based on an Asian ink painting technique that normally doesn’t incorporate color, although some sumi-e artists have used color in addition to black ink. For my example picture, I’ve turned the Contrast way up, used a high value for Stroke Width, and set the Stroke Pressure fairly low. The result is a shadowed, over-saturated “painting” that would look equally good printed on a T-shirt or framed and hung on a wall.

Figure 10.15. Sumi-e yields a fun, pop-art appearance.

Fun Filters

Some of these filters are pretty wacky; others don’t do too much at all. What they have in common is that their results could only have come out of Photoshop Elements or a similar program. There’s no way you could achieve these effects with a brush and paint. Let’s try out a few fun filters on a different example image (see Figure 10.16). You’ll find these filters all over the Filter menu; there are even a few in the Adjustments category:

• Gradient Map converts an image to grayscale and then remaps the colors on the white-to-black gray scale to match another gradient, which you can specify. So, for example, if you used a red-to-blue gradient, light areas of the image would be red, dark areas would turn blue, and medium areas would show up as purple.

• Posterize reduces a picture to a specific number of colors in each color channel. Want to simulate silk-screening or paint-by-numbers? This is the filter you need.

• Threshold changes the image to all black and white pixels; you can choose the gray point above which pixels turn black and below which they turn white.

Figure 10.16. The turtle is a pretty neat metal sculpture, but it doesn’t stand out from its surroundings.

Starting with Gradient Map, take a look at how radically this picture can change (see Figure 10.17). I chose a spectrum (rainbow) gradient to produce this image, but you can choose any preset gradient or create your own, with as many different colors as you like. For greater realism, use a gradient that shades from a dark color on one end to a light color on the other end. Or, if realism isn’t what you want, go crazy and create your own gradient.

Figure 10.17. With this gradient, the image looks like the false-color medical and scientific images you see in magazines.

Of course, filters aren’t always about color. Take, for example, the Distort filters, each of which changes the shape of your image in a different way. Ocean Ripple makes the picture look as though it’s floating over the waves, while Twirl does exactly that, spinning the picture around its center. Polar Coordinates, on the other hand, pulls a math trick of remapping each pixel’s XY coordinates within the image window to a circular grid originating in the center of the window (see Figure 10.18).

Figure 10.18. Polar Coordinates is about as far from useful as a filter can get.

In the Pixelate category are several filters that break your image up into small pieces in various ways. Crystallize, with a user-definable cell size, turns the picture into a mosaic of irregular polygons, somewhat crystalline in nature (see Figure 10.19). Mosaic, on the other hand, produces square tiles which, while they look interesting, don’t look much like a real mosaic.

Figure 10.19. The Crystallize filter actually produces a pointillist effect.

I enjoy working with several of the Stylize filters, too. Glowing Edges is a favorite; it’s the only Stylize filter that uses the Filter Gallery. It turns your picture into a glowing network of colored lines and curves that follow the original shapes more or less accurately depending on the Smoothness value you set (see Figure 10.20). If you want less detail cluttering up the picture with this filter, try blurring the background and surfaces before applying it.

Figure 10.20. After applying Glowing Edges, the image looks a bit like a scratchboard picture.

LET ME TRY IT

Experimenting with Filters

Filters are my favorite way to save a blah or even just plain bad photo. In this case, I applied several successive filters to a vacation snapshot to turn it into an Impressionist painting.

1. Open the picture on which you want to work in the Editor’s Full Edit mode. Check the title bar to make sure it’s in RGB mode, and change the mode using the Mode submenu of the Image menu if necessary.
2. Choose Filter Gallery from the Filter menu. In the Filter Gallery dialog, zoom in or out so you can see the part of the image that’s most important to you.
3. Start out your experimentation by applying the Sprayed Strokes filter (part of the Brush Strokes Group). Your settings will vary depending on the image’s resolution and content, but this is a good beginning for a faux painting (see Figure 10.21).
   

   Figure 10.21. The higher the picture’s resolution, the higher your Stroke Length and Spray Radius settings will need to be.

   

4. Click the New Effect Layer button at the bottom of the dialog, then switch to the Artistic filter group and apply the Film Grain filter. Keep the Grain setting at 8 or lower, and make sure the Intensity setting isn’t so high that it’s washing out the image by making it too bright. Then click OK to close the Filter Gallery.
5. If you want to compare before and after views of the image, click Undo to remove the filters’ effects and then Redo to restore them. You’ll see that we’ve added texture and warmth while brightening the image somewhat.
6. Choose Ripple from the Filter menu’s Distort submenu. Use a fairly high setting for Amount (I made mine 500 as shown in Figure 10.22) and click OK. You may have to undo and try again a couple of times if your image is high resolution, as you won’t see a true representation of the results in the Ripple dialog’s preview.
   

   Figure 10.22. The preview makes it look as though the house in my picture will be crazily distorted by the Ripple filter, but that doesn’t turn out to be the case.

   

7. Finally, choose Gaussian Blur from the Filter menu’s Blur submenu. Apply enough blur to soften the edges of the ripples and give you a nice Impressionist effect (see Figure 10.23). Click OK—you’re done!

Figure 10.23. A small dose of blur is the equivalent of smoothing off the mold marks.

Adding Layer Styles

Layer styles are combinations of four basic effects that you can apply to a layer: drop shadows, glows, bevels, and strokes (outlines). Available via the Effects panel, they’re divided into more than a dozen categories as general as Drop Shadows and as specific as Glass Buttons. They’re called layer styles because they’re best applied to objects on layers, rather than to entire images. A drop shadow, for example, won’t show up at all unless part of the layer is transparent so you can see the shadow falling on the layers below and the Background layer.

Applying Layer Styles

Start by switching to the layer you want to work on in the Layers panel (choose Layers from the Window menu if you don’t see it). Then display the Effects panel (choose Effects from the Windows menu) and click the second button in the top row to see the available layer effects (see Figure 10.24). There are a lot of them, so they’re divided into categories, and you can choose which category to view in the pop-up menu at the top of the panel. Or, if you want to see all your options right in front of you, choose Show All.

Figure 10.24. The thumbnails give you an idea of what the layer effects look like, but you won’t know how they really work out in your image until you try them.

To apply one of the layer styles to the current layer, either double-click its thumbnail or click once and then click Apply at the bottom of the panel. Because many of the underlying settings in layer effects are resolution based, your result may not look exactly like the thumbnail—shadows may be smaller or larger, borders may be a different size, and so on. I’ll show you how to change your settings to modify an effect in the next section. Meanwhile, you can also experiment with applying more than one style to the same layer; layer styles are cumulative, meaning that you can pile as many onto a single layer as you want, combining them to create more complex effects.

Once a layer contains an effect, you can, of course, remove the effect by choosing Clear from the Layer Style submenu of the Layer menu. You can also choose Copy and Paste, which you can use to copy layer styles (complete with your customized settings) from one layer to another. As you modify the layer in other ways, such as by painting on it or erasing part of it, its layer style updates automatically to correspond to the new layer content.

Modifying Layer Styles

Choose Style Settings from the Layer Style submenu in the Layer menu (or double-click the layer style icon in the Layers panel) to see all the individual settings that go into making up a single layer style. The Style Settings dialog is divided into several sections, each containing multiple settings, and it has a Preview check box so that you can watch the image change as you modify the settings (see Figure 10.25).

Figure 10.25. Style Settings controls the finicky details of layer styles.

The first setting, located right at the top of the Style Settings dialog, is Lighting Angle. The angle at which the light seems to fall on objects determines the appearance of their shadows and strokes, which is why this setting is so vital. You can change it by dragging the line around the circle or typing a specific value in the text entry field. Although you can apply different Angle settings to different layers, all the style elements (shadows, glows, and so on) on each layer will use the same setting.

Next come Drop Shadow Size, Distance, and Opacity—all pretty straightforward (see Figure 10.26). Size determines how far beyond the edges of the object the shadow extends, while Distance controls the apparent distance between the object on the layer and the surface on which its shadow falls below. Opacity, of course, is how transparent the shadow is; completely opaque shadows never look realistic, so you need to experiment with how much objects below the shadow show through.

Figure 10.26. You can control shadow size, distance, and opacity as well as color.

The next section of the dialog holds Size and Color settings for both inner and outer glows. Drag the sliders to control how far the glow extends, and click the color thumbnails to open the Color Picker and choose a new color for the glow.

Moving downward, we come to the Bevel section, where you can set the size of the bevel and its direction, Up or Down. Size is a crucial setting, because the right size depends on the size of the object on the layer. You want it to be wide enough that it shows but narrow enough that it’s still an edge detail. The Direction setting determines whether the object looks as though it’s protruding upward from the surface below or cut into the surface.

Stroke, as you know, is a line around the edge of an object. In the case of layer styles, you can determine both a stroke’s size (its width) and its opacity, as well as its color.

One last setting has a great deal of influence on how a layer style looks in your particular image: scaling. In the Layer Style submenu of the Layer menu, choose Scale Effects. Click the triangle next to the text entry field and drag the slider to change the size of the layer style effects relative to the size of the layer contents (see Figure 10.27).

Figure 10.27. By scaling the shadow effect on the text, I can make it closely match the real shadow in this photo.

LET ME TRY IT

Working with Layer Styles

From drop shadows to glows to bevels and embossing, layer styles are hands-down the quickest way to jazz up a run-of-the-mill image. They’re easy to apply, and also easy to modify as needed.

1. In the Layers panel (choose Layers from the Window menu if you don’t see it), create a partially transparent layer (such as a type or shape layer) or edit a layer in your image to make parts of it transparent. If the layer doesn’t have any transparent areas, the layer style is applied to the entire layer and often doesn’t show because of that. Make sure your target layer is selected in the Layers panel (see Figure 10.28).
   

   Figure 10.28. The butterfly (or is it a moth?) blends in too much with the background, so I’ll apply a layer style to make it stand out.

   

2. In the Effects panel, click the second button in the top row to see the available layer effects. Choose a category in the pop-up menu at the top of the panel.
3. Double-click the thumbnail for the layer effect you want to apply (see Figure 10.29).
   

   Figure 10.29. Here I’m applying the Heavy outer glow effect.

   

4. Back in the Layers panel, double-click the layer style icon for the style you just applied to open the Style Settings dialog.
5. In each check-marked section (indicating the style elements used in the current style), make changes as needed (see Figure 10.30). Be sure that the Preview box at the top of the dialog is checked so you can see the results of your changes in real-time.
   

   Figure 10.30. I’ve changed the size, color, and opacity of the glow to better suit my particular image.

   

Applying Photo Effects

The Effects panel is where a lot of fun stuff happens to your pictures. So far in this chapter, you’ve seen how you can apply filters from the Effects panel and use it to apply layer styles. Now we’ll look at the third category of effects found there: photo effects. These are preset combinations of image adjustments and filters that can instantly change the entire look and feel of your images. To see the available photo effects, display the Effects panel and click its third button. Again, you’ll find that the effects are divided into several categories to make browsing through them easier, but if you prefer to see them all listed simultaneously, you can choose Show All from the category menu at the top of the panel (see Figure 10.31).

Figure 10.31. The photo effects range from simple color tints to complex textures and patterns.

Photo effects are applied the same way filters and layer styles are: by double-clicking a thumbnail, by clicking a thumbnail and then clicking Apply, or even by just dragging the thumbnail into the image window. Like layer styles and filters, they affect only the current layer. If you want to apply the effect to the entire image, you’ll need to either flatten the layers into a single Background layer (choose Flatten Image from the Layer menu) or apply it to each layer in turn. Try both of these techniques, in fact, because they’ll yield different results.

Photo effects are like filters and different from layer styles in that you can’t edit them or remove them once applied. The only way to restore your original image after using a photo effect is to use the Undo History. This is because photo effects are similar to macros in a word processor; each one applies a series of commands to an image, rather than a single style. This means they can be quite complex (see Figure 10.32), but it also means that you’ll want to save a copy of untouched pictures before applying a photo effect.

Figure 10.32. I combined several photo effects to modify this picture’s color and texture.