Photoshop Filter Fun

I had some time tonight and  decided to explore the more extreme effects of photoshop filters. Here's the results. The original picture is a cropped shot of red roses in a water bottle, backlighted, underexposed and generally a blah snapshot. But it was perfect for explorations.

I think that it's important to explore the extremes of the filters to get a sense of what they can do, although most of them are patenly useless for most applications. Neverless this was fun and I hope I cna remember all the stuff I wrote as captions for the images.  

You may have to look at the individual images to find out which filter and such I used.  Oh well, I'll just dump them in here and try to remember.  

The left one is done with the plastic wrap filter. It looks like it's beenshrink wrapped to the wall, not a happy thought but then it's only an image.  

The right  one is the stained glass filter set to about 35 cell size. the very small cell sized make a grainy pointillistic effect, and the larger ones look like th kind of mosaics people put on concrete garden stepping stones.  Idid not try the mosaic filter but it is most likely very similar. 

 
The left  image is solarized. I have no idea what that means except that iit seems to make all the highlights blue--perhaps like blueprint paper that turns dark blue in sunlight and leaves white places in shadows.

 The right one was done with the Image Adjustment menu Hue/Saturation/Lightness.  I was aiming for blue roses, and got them with red leaves and a green water bottle. The Hue chooser was the main slider, and I played with the others only to get some balance of colors. 

   Both these image use the  Neon Glow under the Filters Menu, the graphics palette.

 Teh one on the left is set to 24, the highest setting.  It fills the background whidh inthe orginal picture is mosly white with pale bushes int he background. 

The filter shifts to the white part of the picture at a setting of about 2. The  one on the right is set at -1. As you can see, the glow is on the dark part of the image--vampire roses.  Playing with the sliders is the only way to see what is likely to show up next. 

 Both of these image use the Gradient for Grayscale filter under image adjustment. The one on the left isobviously grayscale, and sees to work as a negative, which could be lots of fun as an overlay or lighting effect.  The one on the right uses an orange purple gradient, which s more fun, but probably not as useful unless you wanted halloween roses. 

 The nexst thing I will need to do is to load several of these as layers an see what kinds of hijinks I can think of.

 Teh left image uses the color replacement tool under the Image adjustment menu. It works very well for colors with a limited range of shading. Evern with the slider set at 200 and a few extra colors added in, the roses still have a lavender pink edge. 

On the right, I used a very strong, yellow spotlight with all the sliders pusted to the right to brighten  the image, taking out the background and all subtle details.  Usually the spotlight is highlighting one spot and darkening the others, but not here. 

 On the left is Extrusion, under the Distort menu. Useless but interesting.  It beats a bed of nails if you want an image perforated. 

On the right is an extreme application of the dust and scratches filter under Noise. I kept the texture low and the noise higih to get the blurry effects. When the texture is slid to the right, the shapes of the flowers showed through, which defeated the purpose of doing the filter.

Some filters completely lose the orignial image. TheGlowing Edges under the artistisc menu keeps some outer edges, but as youcan see, the effect works better on manufactured goods than on natural shapes.

The same is true on the right with the chrome filter inthe same menu. The shapes fo the rose are compeltgely hidden under the chrom swirls but the water bottel and remote are still recognizable.  

 I had no idea what cutout might mean on the filter gallery, but it turns out to be flat areas of color--very flash-y, on the left.  I liked it. It hink it might make more complex image into something that could easily be pulled into flash and transormed to vectors. 

On the right is an experiment with curve. I have never done anything except make dull colored things look metallic--a trick I learned from from How to Cheat in Photoshop 3, a book I highly recommend.