Photoshop Filters

When I first sat down with Photoshop and started experimenting with layers and filters, I had a temptation to spend the rest of my life seeing how far I could take ONE single image. I have gotten over this urge, but the attraction of post-processing is so strong that many people gave up photography in favor of creation just through software — sometimes even starting without any original image. Sometimes I just start with something simple like a left-to-right color gradient and then go bonkers with it for several hours.

Many regard the "artistic" features as cheating — an insult to the impressionists. You can use these filters in cheesy ways, but I wonder what Monet would have done with Photoshop. I doubt he would have rejected it, but then I never spoke to Monet.

Bottom Line: The post-processing filters can produce infinite variations on your original. It is not immoral to filter your photos unless your intent is immoral.

This set of images allows you to create subtle blends by using the sliders. (Yes, it would be nice if you could arrange the 8 panels in any order, so you could blend any two panels, but in trying to figure out how to make this site work at all our brains started hurting too much and we decided to launch a first, imperfect version, and then revise it if there was demand.

105mm, f 19, ISO 100

 

base image
portrait blur
diffuse
stamp
palette knife
negative
ripple
halftone
base image
portrait blur
diffuse
stamp
palette knife
negative
ripple
halftone
base image
portrait blur
diffuse
stamp
palette knife
negative
ripple
halftone
Left
Right

The original is a garden-variety portrait of Nicole.

This is a powerful, quick-and-dirty portrait treatment: copy the image to a new layer, blur it a lot, then erase the areas that should not be blurred. If you erase just the blurry eyes, nose, mouth, hair and clothing the result will be a nice soft, Hollywoodish image with all wrinkles removed. Cheesy, but fast and powerful.

This is a Photoshop filter I wandered across called Diffuse Glow, hiding, strangely, under the Distort group of filters. This thing has many powerful adjustments, and then you can combine these with the original image to get even more subtle or strange effects.

(Slide the slider a bit to the left to combine it with the blurry image to get intermediate effects.)

Stamp produces a darn good drawing in a sort of Shepard Fairey style with very little fuss. It chose red and white, but I changed it to gray and white.

Pallette knife is a direct assault on Impressionism. I find that with certain images at certain settings, it can produce a slightly abstract version of an image that can be very useful.

Anybody above a certain age will have a strong, probably nostalgic, reaction to a black and white negative. It does look weird, but for us geezers, it brings back years of working with negatives: learning tricks to see them as positive by holding them just right against the light, trying to pick out details to figure out which print came from which one. It reminds us of the good old days, which in many ways were not that great. For example, you could easily shoot an entire wedding and not realize your camera was set wrong and get nothing. I did that.

I like the ripple effect so much that I went and got ripple glass and shot Nicole through it. Here is the fast way to get a similar look, setting aside the moral issues of cheap computer tricks versus "honest" photography.

I have always liked the color halftone filter. You get some reference back to pop art, but this look is rooted in reality: even today, most magazines and books are STILL printed this way.

The original is a garden-variety portrait of Nicole.

This is a powerful, quick-and-dirty portrait treatment: copy the image to a new layer, blur it a lot, then erase the areas that should not be blurred. If you erase just the blurry eyes, nose, mouth, hair and clothing the result will be a nice soft, Hollywoodish image with all wrinkles removed. Cheesy, but fast and powerful.

This is a Photoshop filter I wandered across called Diffuse Glow, hiding, strangely, under the Distort group of filters. This thing has many powerful adjustments, and then you can combine these with the original image to get even more subtle or strange effects.

(Slide the slider a bit to the left to combine it with the blurry image to get intermediate effects.)

Stamp produces a darn good drawing in a sort of Shepard Fairey style with very little fuss. It chose red and white, but I changed it to gray and white.

Pallette knife is a direct assault on Impressionism. I find that with certain images at certain settings, it can produce a slightly abstract version of an image that can be very useful.

Anybody above a certain age will have a strong, probably nostalgic, reaction to a black and white negative. It does look weird, but for us geezers, it brings back years of working with negatives: learning tricks to see them as positive by holding them just right against the light, trying to pick out details to figure out which print came from which one. It reminds us of the good old days, which in many ways were not that great. For example, you could easily shoot an entire wedding and not realize your camera was set wrong and get nothing. I did that.

I like the ripple effect so much that I went and got ripple glass and shot Nicole through it. Here is the fast way to get a similar look, setting aside the moral issues of cheap computer tricks versus "honest" photography.

I have always liked the color halftone filter. You get some reference back to pop art, but this look is rooted in reality: even today, most magazines and books are STILL printed this way.