Study on Filter Effects
What is a Filter Effect?
Light cannot be perceived and sensed unless it leaves an impression in our retinas. To get there, the proper amount of light is controlled (filtered) by the eyelids, is again filtered by the iris, travels an exact distance through the eyeball (which contains a liquid that filters the light) until it reaches the complex system formed by the retina which translates (filters) light into signals that go to the brain and is finally interpreted (filtered) according to some experiences and standards (filters) particular to each individual.
Photography works approximately the same way (a caveat here: Photography and vision have similarities and distinctions that are beyond the scope of this article). The light reaches the lens (a filter), gets its amount controlled by the aperture and shutter (filters) to reach the electronics of a sensor or the substances of a film (both complex filters).
After temporarily being stored in sensors or films, now the light impressions are taking some shape. Films go to laboratories to suffer the application of chemicals to remove (to filter) some parts of the film and leave the desired impressions, using processes (filters) called “C-41”, “Cross-Processing” or others. Electronic signals arriving from the sensor are converted (filtered) to digital signals, then adapted by tonality curves (filters) to produce that specific image characteristic of the camera brand we are using, that goes to several filters to produce a JPG or RAW, which is finally stored in memory cards in a specific format dictated by the vendor (another filter).
The last step is print the film in paper that could have the “Glossy Filter” or the “Matte Filter”. And I am not talking about famous photographers of all time that apply and applied intermediate filters like “Dodge” and “Burn” (and many others) to enhance the results or effects. On the digital side, images are read from the cards and converted (filtered) to digital information in computers, suffered the application of various filters provided by programs like “Photoshop”, “Gimp” and others to twist and bend the images to produce effects as desired, or perhaps printed using special filters provided by printer’s makers.
Filters can be of various types, for example, optical, mechanical, electronic and chemical and always produce an effect. If we want to see a picture with a strong red tonality, we can force the light to go through a red colored filter that removes other colors present in the light thus leaving only its red component. If we want to produce a picture that mimics our eyes’ field of view, we could use a filter called “50 mm lens” because this filter forces only the light arriving from certain angle of view to unscathed excite our senses. Photographers used Velvia and Ektachrome films to obtain (effect) certain characteristics of tonalities and types of pictures, each one a filter in itself (even today, Ilford films are used for their rich and deep black and white impressions), not to mention the “Lomo Filters” with their absurd and creative effects. Certain camera brands are known for their ability to deal with (to filter) the noise inherent to all sensors and produce (effect) almost noise free images.
If you think that this idea is a stretch, take a look at the construction of a digital sensor or the production of a film and you are going to see how many filters are there. Do you think that lenses are not filters? Have you seen a schematic drawing of the simplest one to check how many different filters and coatings for many purposes are there as well?
Wrapping up, it is my understanding that there is not such a thing as Pure Photography or purists in Photography by the multitude of filters that are applied in each step of the process. Granted, a photographer may say that a Kodakchrome film is always the same; however, did the photographer chose ASA 100 or ASA 400? It is known that the more sensitive the film (the filter), the grainier are the pictures (the effect).
At the digital land, there is a long debate about JPG and RAW pictures. Purists advocate that JPG is the real one because what you see is what you get. Just a second! To produce a JPG image, the photographer has to choose the white balance, the ISO, the shutter speed… They are all filters that produce specific effects.
I understand that Photography with film provides a smaller palette of filters as compared to digital. True, film photographers need to be a lot more skilled because films are expensive, slower to process and there is no preview to correct the settings. Memory cards can hold hundreds of pictures; the good pictures are used and the bad ones are erased to make space for new pictures. Films, on the other hand, hold at most 36 pictures and, once taken, good or bad, the corresponding “space” is gone forever. To be a good photographer with film requires a lot of art, sensibility and experience. Not that there are not good photographers in the digital era; on the contrary, art and sensibility still need to be there but experience comes more with the errors than anything else.
Roughly speaking, in Photography, a Filter Effect (FF) is a transformation that is applied to an image to produce another image with some specific aspect provided by that transformation.
Original Image → Filter Effect → Transformed Image
The concept of an “Original Image” means the image that is used as the base for the transformation and it can be:
- The light that is hitting the lens of a camera;
- The set of electrical pulses produced by the light hitting the sensor of a digital camera;
- The sensitive film hit by the light that went through the lens;
- The negative or positive film to be used for enlargements or projections;
- The set of binary values that is written to memory;
- The images that are processed by photo editing programs like Photoshop, Gimp, etc;
- Many other sources.
Categories of Filter Effects
Summarizing what was seen above, there are several types of Filter Effects:
- Physical: lenses, sensor and film types, polarizing filters, infrared, etc;
- In camera: White balance, tonal curves to produce an image, etc;
- For film: chemical process, split toning, etc;
- For digital: correction filters like exposure, contrast, artistic effects, various types of brushing, textures, and many other types of filters that are typically worked using a computer program in post-processing.
For this study, only the last category will be considered, that is, filter effects that are applied by specialized software like Photoshop, Gimp, Aperture, etc., it’s possible to divide these effects in three other categories:
- Editing or light processing, just to make the pictures more presentable, resembling as much as possible the real scene: these are the basic filters like contrast, exposure, shadows, saturation, lens correction, spot removal, straightening, etc. It also includes a discrete noise reduction, sharpness and crop;
- Post or moderate processing, which goes a step further to transform the pictures into black and white, cross-processed, significant crop, HDR conversion, and other effects that still render the images recognizable in relationship to the real scene;
- Manipulation or massive processing, or to change, convert, twist, modify, extract, add and replace elements in the picture. The results may or may not resemble the real scene anymore.
The filter effects, as considered by this study, will only focus on the third category above, where any single process of image alteration is admissible.
In this respect, the market provides an almost infinite range of filter effects of all kinds, some of them running on desktops whereas many others only available for devices (iPhone, iPad and Android). In general, the latter do not allow high resolution images to be processed thus somewhat limiting the work of professionals. With the exception of some interesting options, this study will further limit the alternatives available to only those running on desktops or large processing systems capable of processing all kinds of images in all sizes and resolutions.
Filter Effects Formats
Repeating, a filter effect is a single or a series of modifiers performed over an image to alter its pixels in such a way that the resulting image presents an interesting aspect. These modifiers work in different ways:
1) Plug-In: it is piece of a program that works by invocation from another program like Photoshop. Once installed, these plug-ins can be activated as though they were an intrinsic part of the host program (Photoshop, in this case). While working, the plug-in takes the control of the actions until this control is relinquished back.;
2) A stand alone program: it is a program or a set of programs designed to work independently and to perform a specific function of producing the filter effects desired. Some products act both as plug-in and stand alone as desired;
3) Photoshop Actions: it is a prerecorded sequence of small actions designed to perform certain functionality within Photoshop. Although Actions can perform pretty much anything, an interesting usage is the creation of filter effects.
By far, there are more Actions available for download because they are simpler to build and use. Most commonly, they are of the type “Click to Run and Done”, which means they only allow simple or no control of settings at all.
Most Common Filter Effects
A list of the most popular filter effects organized by their vendor, general comments about the products, along with the pricing. In no way, this list provides an order of relevance of the filters.
Topaz Laboratories
A large collection of different kinds of filter effects ranging black and white conversion, star effects, the attractive Impression, texture effects, the moderately interesting Simplify and the glow effects among others. In particular, Impression provides an array of artistic effects varying from pure abstract to stylistic effects resembling works from Cezanne, Rembrandt, along with watercolor, impasto and other effects.
The price revolves around US$ 100 but, from time to time, there are offers with significantly reduced price.
Most of these products act as plug-ins to Photoshop and other tools but some can also run stand alone (that is, they run by themselves).
More information can be found at Topaz Laboratories.
Filter Forge
This product works in a different way than others as it is comprised by a basic product (Filter Forge) running both as a plug-in or a stand alone application. By itself, it does not do anything but to follow a “recipe” or a script containing instructions on how to do a specific effect. These scripts amount on the thousand and are usually built by contributors. Once the basic module is installed (there are different classes with varying prices ranging from US$ 30 to US$ 300), any number of scripts can be download and used without any additional expense. This means that new scripts can be downloaded as soon as they are launched. Depending of the class of the basic product, any user can build his/her own filter and optionally contribute to the general library of scripts.
As imagined, there are filters for any kind of effect imagined, some of them slight variations from others, including alterations from previous ones.
The only disadvantage is that, the more complicated and theoretically interesting the filter, the longer it takes to run, sometimes for hours on end depending on the size of the original image and settings applied.
More information can be found at Filter Forge.
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop includes the traditional package with some basic filter effects that could produce interesting results specially if combined with other effects. The amount of effects is limited and restricted to 8-bit images only.
In addition, it is possible to download extensions to produce special effects, some paid and some free. In particular, there is the Free Textures from Russel, which presents a well packaged combination of textures for almost all situations.
ON1
From a variety of different products, the FX module is the one that fits the bill for this study. It either works stand alone or as a plug-in. Standing out, the set of filters mimicking film characteristics takes a prominent role in this package. Its cost revolves around US$ 70 depending the offers.
More information can be obtained at ON1.
NIK Collection
The NIK Collection has been in the market for quite a while providing a range of effects both for color and black and white work. Recently, Google made the collection available for free download.
For all reasons, it a must have!
Macphun FX Photo Studio
More a collection of effects ready to be used (similar to applications available for devices) than a sophisticated filter effects product, it does not seem to provide much room for creativity and work. Tagged as around US$ 40 depending on the offer, more information can be found at Macphun.
Applying Filter Effects
There is no magic in using any filter effects: one just needs to select a picture, select one or more filters, play with their controls and get something interesting in return. This is the simplest approach.
A more elaborate work is to do what painters used to do with their subjects, that is, select the scene (a picture), remove useless elements (crop, etc), add interesting features (cloning, composite) and paint (apply the filters). In other words, the application of a filter effect is not simply mechanical act playing a few sliders and – bang! – the masterpiece is ready for the world! It is far more than that; it is the application of a fair amount of art like a painter does. It is the use of an artistic freedom to properly compose the work and to apply the art on the canvas.
The Raw Materials
Again, the application of one or more filter effects is not just the act of moving back and forth a few sliders from a generic piece of software; rather, it is a conscious act of creation of a piece of art even though the result might not be the perfect one. Sactisfaction is another by product…
Given the sheer amount of filter effects available for work, it is absolutely impossible to use or to try them all. Usually, it is interesting to stick with a few of them and get fully acquainted with what they can do. Conversely, some filters produce artistic renderings of famous painters, while others produce abstracts and so on. What are the filters that I feel more attracted to? What kind of artistic expression I identify myself with?
A recipe for …
. It all starts by selecting the appropriate pictures for work: while some pictures were just “made” for the job, others simply do not render anything interesting at all. How is it possible to know it? By playing, by experimenting and by working and working. With time, it is possible to “visualize” or “conceptualize” which kind of pictures works better with specific type of effects. The expression “appropriate pictures” means to chose the pictures with great potential for good results or scenes that fit the interests of the artist. As an example, if I like working with landscapes with plenty of details, I am not going to select a portrait nor I am going to apply a filter designed to ignore details. In essence, there is no rule of thumb when choosing a candidate for work; it all goes with the experience and feeling;
. Before any attempt to apply a filter, unwanted details or other adjustment work needs to be done. Light adjustments, rule of thirds, alignment, contrast and others will have an impact in the future work. Imperfections in the picture may disappear after the filters were applied because they tend to distort and twist the details in a positive way. However, magically some wrong treatment or even previously unnoticed details magically show up later on, making it difficult to correct them as the filter treatment is unique and not easily recognized by the Photoshop tools. Often, after a relevant time has been spent working over a picture with unique brush work and a convoluted sequence of steps producing a wonderful result, some significant details detracting the overall look are noticed forcing strenuous hard work to be applied to be removed and, occasionally, forcing to start over the work. It is really important, then, the closely inspect the picture for possible faults before doing the real work;
. The resolution of an image may have a significant impact in the final result. Some filters are literally “triggered” by the lack of details (or the presence of them) and may present surprising results. In particular, images produced by old digital cameras or devices like iPads are excellent starting point for investigation. Another technique is to lower the resolution of the image and then work with it until almost at the end of the work. Then, increase the resolution back to the desired one and apply one or more subtle filters that “bind” the distorted pixels produced by the enlargement;
. Likewise a rich detailed picture, the presence of noise (either naturally there or artificially enhanced), may introduce interesting twists;
After you get acquainted with the process of filter application, it becomes more and more predictable which images work better with which filters. In this way, images can be “prepared” specifically for those filters;
. Apply the filters, a single one or one on top of the other. There is no magical rule to determine which filter and which settings to apply. Creativity, a sense of artistry and identification with the art will govern the results. After a variable number of experiments, an artistic style (if not present yet) and some filters become the choice for future works too;
. Always a good suggestion, the use of textures may give an extra punch to the resulting image;
. Apply the final touches by enhancing or downplaying selected parts of the picture. A tablet with a pen is must for this kind of work because it mimics the brush work painters place on their pieces of art. Again, there is no rule on what to do at this stage of the work thus relying to the work to be done entirely to the artistic imagination.
Final Thoughts
Working with filters as an invitation for unexpected results and a reason to express one’s art. Sometimes, the results are simply so bad that the best decision to be taken is to abandon the work and start over with a different approach, other sequence of work or even with a different picture. Conversely, we may have results so good that we may want to replicate the process with other pictures but steps used are forgotten in the middle of so much work.
More often than not, work with filter effects is so complex and random that, if needed and go back to do it again with another picture (or even when restarting the same one), it would be quite difficult or even impossible to obtain the same results again unless careful notes were taken at every single step used. But, then, what is the fun of not being able to rediscover things every time?
Nevertheless, this is the pleasure of working with filter effects, the pleasure of being creative, the fun of producing different things that could stand out in the middle of millions and millions of pictures being produced every single second in the world.