Filters

Filters are the Photopaint equivalents of the filters used in photography to create various effects. As in photography, some filters are merely corrective in that they try to preserve the appearance of the original image while removing some defects, and others are creative in that they radically change the image.

The best way to understand the effects of filters is to experiment with them a bit. Here only a few of the filters, of the many available, will be described.

All of the filters are accessible through the Filters menu.

They are grouped into several general categories, for example, Artistic, Sharpen, Distort, Tiles, and others. Within these categories there is a wide range of types, many of which are editable by you.

Take a look at Super Nova under Light Effects. A dialog will open, making it possible to edit and preview the filter before applying it.

image\ppSuperNovaDlg.gif

Note that whenever a filter is applied it affects only the currently selected - or active - layer.

You can undo the filter by selecting Undo from the Edit menu.

You can apply as many filters as you like to an image, whether on the same layer each time or across some or all of the layers, using many different types of filter.

Taking the above super nova effect, you can add a page curl filter on top. This is another good filter to experiment with and again easily editable.

Select Filters/Artistic/Page Curl to open the "Page Curl" dialog.

image\ppPageCurlDlg.gif

The filter effects will take a few seconds to be implemented. If you decide you don’t like them, just select Undo from the Edit menu and start again.

Note that once you’ve applied a filter you can make some further changes using the Fade … option at the top of the Filters menu. Thus in the case of Page Curl you can select Fade Page Curl to open the "Fade" dialog. In here you can change the opacity and the blend mode of the curl (or whatever was the last filter you applied).

image\ppFade.gif

The effect is to fade the filtered image into the original unfiltered image by reducing the opacity from the maximum of 100%. As the slider approaches 0 in the Opacity box the effect of the filter becomes fainter until at 0 the unfiltered image is restored. You can experiment with fading and immediately see the results in the image window.

The options in the Mode box - Normal, Dissolve, Behind, Multiply, and so on - determine how the filter will blend with the existing colors. The modes work pretty much as they do in Blending between layers, with the difference that once you’ve applied Fade the blend becomes permanent (although you can undo a fade or a filter by selecting Undo from the Edit menu).

Click on OK to exit the dialog and apply the Fade, otherwise click on Cancel.

For more examples of filters, see Filters: examples.