Filter effects change the outcome of the image in a more general way. Instead of just moving pixels or simply changing a color value, they oftentimes change pixels according to other pixels on the screen using specific rules. This page gives you an overview of what is possible with these effects.
A Drop Shadow effect that generates a 2D shadow effect based on the Layer Alpha. It uses the same computation internally as the Blur effect and the Shadow can be tinted into colors other than Black. Apart from pure drop shadows, the effect can be used for many other effects, such as to create object glow effects (with light color settings) or outline effects (with a very small diameter setting). It features these parameters:
The available values are “In Percent” -the default one, using percentage of the whole image size, or “In Pixels” – using absolute pixel values.
A mosaic effect that turns the image/Layer into a set of tiles or small rectangles, each one colored with an average of the color values of pixels inside that particular tile. It features these parameters:
This creates a Blur effect, which diffuses the pixel values by averaging with the surrounding pixels. This creates a rough out of focus effect. The parameters available are:
A glare effect creates a smooth halo around the brightest areas of your image. It features these parameters:
The available values are “In Percent” -the default one, using percentage of the whole image size, or “In Pixels” – using absolute pixel values.
Crash Zoom creates a radial blur, often called "God Rays" or light shards, by blurring image or layer pixels radially from the effect center, as controlled by these available parameters:
Creates a video noise effect, based on the RGB values of an external image file – this image file is constantly animated to give the impression of dynamic noise. It features these parameters:
The Feedback effect creates a trail effect by blending semi-transparent previous frames with current one. Therefore it works best with animated content. These are the parameters available:
In addition, if we click on the little arrow close to the Loader, which only appears when the mouse cursor is on this area, another contextual menu appears. This new menu shows Loader presets and additional options:
Delay by a couple of frames.
When Frames or Amount is zero, the effect is deactivated and all buffers are discarded.
When the effect is re-activated by increasing Frames or Amount, or when the effect is first started, the output is frozen until enough frames are buffered.
Posterization is the effect caused when reducing the dynamic range or amount of color values available, rounding up or down pixel color values. This results in more noticeable transition between color tones - similar to solarized images or banding artifacts.
Posterization is the effect caused when reducing the dynamic range or amount of color values available, rounding up or down pixel color values. This effect creates a Posterize effect similar to the Posterize RGB effect above, but operates based on the HSV (Hue/Saturation/Value) color mode.
Saturation controls how intense are the color values of an image, the lower the values, the more color values are shifted towards white in the color wheel, and the image colors look less intense. On the contrary, higher saturation values imply moving the color values away from white, resulting in more intense colors, more saturated.
Edge detection effect detects the outline of shapes in the image or Layer. In order to detect this lines, it filters the image to create a high contrast image showing the edges in white and the rest of the image as black pixels.
As mentioned before, it works together with the All Directions control above,and it is only fully operational when All Directions is turned to 0%
The default value is Luma, which uses the image Luminance or Brightness information, and the other options available are Red, Green, Blue and Alpha.
Swap RGB effect swaps out one or several values of the color channels, based on the selection in the Channels property. Amount changes how much of the values should be swapped, increasing the effect towards 100%. The effects are shown in the table below: in the leftmost column you can see the selected item, and in the other columns you see which original channel is used in which color channel:
R | G | B | |
---|---|---|---|
RG | G | R | B |
GB | R | B | G |
BR | B | G | R |
GBR | G | B | R |
BRG | B | R | G |
Therefore, the options available are pretty obvious: Green, Blue and Red, with Green being the default one.
The next parameters work mainly by tweaking the generated key alpha channel, that is, they perform operations to adjust key density, contrast and the like. Therefore, in order to check the results properly, it is strongly suggested that you switch the output in Preview to Key.
Next are the key or matte tweaking parameters:
The next parameters are used to adjust the despill, the foreground areas that are contaminated by background color bouncing on top of the foreground object. Therefore, in order to check the results properly, it is strongly suggested that you switch the output in Preview to either Despilled or DespillMask options.
Next come the despill or despill-matte tweaking parameters:
The next group of parameters are used to quickly crop the original image, this is often very useful to take out areas
Edge Tuning and softness