Hands on - Digital imaging & video - Emulating photographic filters. Using digital filters to control the colour and tonal properties of your images.

Publication: Personal Computer World

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 2005 VNU Business Media Europe

Byline: Ken McMahon.

As committed digital photographers, what are we to make of the Photo filters introduced in Photoshop CS? These digital filters replicate the effects produced by the coloured glass discs used in front of the lens in film photography to produce colour shifts, tonal changes and other special effects.

You can achieve the same effects with a greater degree of control using Photoshop's colour and tonal controls - Colour balance, Curves, Hue/Saturation - and control the extent of the effect with a selection or mask.

But it's undeniable that these filters produce good results quickly and easily. And for those used to using physical filters, they produce familiar and predictable results.

Not all applications include photo filters, but that doesn't mean you can't reproduce the effect of, say, a skylight, graduated neutral density, or soft focus filter in your image-editing application, and this month I'll show you how to do just that.

Some filter effects are easier to produce than others. Reflections in glass can be almost completely eliminated with a polarising filter, but will take a lot more work to retouch in an image editor. But reproducing the tonal shift caused by a red or yellow filter using black and white film couldn't be simpler.

A typical photographer's photo bag might contain the following filters: skylight/UV; polariser; graduated neutral density; soft focus/spot; plus a yellow, orange and red filter for use with...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.