Photoshop Elements 8 for Windows: The Missing Manual

Photo Filter

The Photo Filter feature gives you a host of nifty filters to work with. These filters are the digital equivalent of those lens-mounted filters used in traditional film photography. They can help you correct problems with your image's white balance, and perform a bunch of other fixes from the seriously photographic to the downright silly. For example, you can correct bad skin tone or dig out an old photo of your fifth-grade nemesis and make him green. Figure 8-13 shows the Photo Filter feature in action.

Figure 8-13. You can use the Photo Filter to correct the color casts caused by artificial lighting or reflected light. Left: This photo had a strong warm cast from nearby incandescent lighting. Right: The filter named "Cooling Filter (LBB)" took care of it. Use one of the warming filters to counteract the blue cast from fluorescent lighting.

Elements comes with 20 photo filters, but for most people, the top six are the most important: three warming filters and three cooling filters. You use these filters to get rid of color casts caused by poor white balance (see Adjusting White Balance).

The filters sometimes work better than the Color Cast eyedropper (The Remove Color Cast Command) because you can control the strength with which you apply them (using the Density slider, explained in a moment). You can also apply them as Adjustment layers (Flattening an image), so you can ...