Photoshop Elements 4: The Missing Manual

Photo Filter

The Photo Filter command gives you a host of nifty new photo filters that are the digital equivalent of the many-colored lens-mounted filters used in traditional film photography. You can use them to correct problems with your image's white balance, as well as for a bunch of other fixes, from the seriously photographical to the downright silly. For example, you can correct a bad skin tone or dig out an old photo of your fifth-grade nemesis and make him green, literally. Figure 8-8 shows one Photo Filter in action.

Elements comes with about a dozen Photo Filters, but for most people, the important ones are the top four: two warming filters and two cooling filters. You use these filters to get rid of the color casts that come from a poor white balance (Section 8.1.2).

The filters are an improvement over the Color Cast eyedropper (Section 7.4.1), because you can control the strength with which you apply them (using the Density slider, explained later). And you can also apply them as Adjustment layers (Section 6.4), so you can tweak them later on. To apply a Photo Filter:

Figure 8-8. You can use the Photo Filter to correct the color casts you get from artificial lighting. Left: This photo had a strong bluish tinge from nearby fluorescent lighting. Right: The Warming Filter (85) took care of it. Use Cooling Filter (80) or Cooling Filter (82) to counteract the orange cast from ...