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What are Photoshop Filters?





Filters are the Photoshop actions which help you alter the image of your choice. There are 13 categories of filters comprising of 110 filters, in other words changes in pictures and images can be done through 110 ways. Basic categories of these filters are “corrective” and “destructive”, described in more detail further on in this tutorial. As the names imply corrective filters are used to correct any problem with the image, and destructive filters allows deleting or modifying the features of an image.

What are Filters


The name ‘Filters’ has been picked from Photography. Filters in optical photography are additional accessories which can be equipped in front of the lens to obtain a desirable effect on the picture. In Photoshop too Filters are used to take the image or the selected area from an image and produce varying effects. Photoshop contains many powerful built-in filters for their users. It also offers support for third-party filters which can be bought from various external sources. There are a few Filter companies from where you can buy filters to meet your advanced requirements.

How to use Photoshop Filters

Photoshop Filters can be very easily applied by selecting your required filters from the filters menu on the top. You need to decide the area where you want the filter to be applied by using the selection mask, which is described elsewhere in this tutorial (MASKS). Otherwise Photoshop styles the entire image with the filter if nothing in selected. Each filter can further be modified with its unique group of preferences which can be tweaked to customize the final result of the Filter.

Besides the filters menu, another way to apply filters and review them is via the Filter Gallery. Filter Gallery does not support all the Photoshop filters and you might find some filters missing. But Adobe has been working constantly on Filter Gallery to make it an innovative and useful tool for the designers. It now lets the user experiment with the several filters and previews them instantly with more interaction than ever.


Using filters in Photoshop

Filters are important part of Photoshop. Whether you are a novice or a pro graphics developer, Filters will always be handy for you. Filters are used to produce interesting effects to your images. You can use the filters to fix the defects in your image or even when you want to create some defects deliberately. You may want to create art out of your photograph or create the effect of an extra light source. Your imagination is the limit with more than a hundred filters provided by Photoshop.

Various Photoshop Filters

The Filters Menu

There are more than 100 inbuilt filters in Photoshop. They are divided into 13 logically named categories. Here on the left is a screenshot which shows the Filter menu of the latest version of Photoshop.

These filters can also be classified as ‘corrective filters’, ‘destructive filters’ and ‘special effect filters’. All these filters can be stacked on each other to produce a combination effect.

You might find these related posts useful too:

  • Destructive and SFX Filters
  • Corrective Filters
  • Filter Gallery Tutorial


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