Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

Chapter 15. The Wide World of Filters

Photoshop’s filters let you create a multitude of special effects that you can apply to images or use to conjure interesting backgrounds. You can run filters on image layers, masks, channels, smart objects, shape layers, and even type layers (provided you convert them into smart objects or rasterize ’em first). The list of special effects you can create by applying filters once, twice, or even 10 times is a mile long. There are a bunch of the little critters too, each with its own special brand of pixel wrangling.

These days, Photoshop’s Filter menu appears to have fewer items than in older versions of the program—the result of a menu reorganization that happened in CS6—but it actually has tons. The program also includes two new blur filters—Path Blur and Spin Blur—that are sure to delight photographers, and possibly a few designers too (especially those who are called upon to add motion to photos!). In addition, 24 of Photoshop’s filters now work on 16- and 32-bit documents (see the box on Understanding Bit Depth to learn more about bit depth).

You’ve already seen a few filters in action, like the ones for sharpening, blurring, adding texture to text, mapping one image to the contours of another, and so on. But that’s just a tiny sliver of what’s available. In this chapter, you’ll be immersed in the realm of filters and discover how you can use ’em to do all kinds of fun and useful stuff. But before you start plowing through the Filter menu, ...