The Photoshop Filters Menu

  A universe of special effects...filters come in two general categories

	Artistic Filters
	Artistic filters are effects that transform a photograph into something resembling a hand-made work of art, such as a drawing, painting or etching. They include the sets of Artistic (naturally), Brush Strokes, Sketch, and Texture filters.
	Alteration Filters
	These are filters that will directly change the appearance of elements on your image, allowing you to stretch, swirl, twist, defocus, and the like. They include the Blur, Distort, Noise, Pixelate, Render and Stylize sets of filters.
	Examples of Filter Effects
	Displayed below and to the left are over a dozen examples of what filters are capable of doing.
	Graphic Pen
	Uses fine, linear ink strokes to capture the details in the original image and is especially striking with scanned images. The filter replaces color in the original image, using the foreground color for ink and background color for paper.
	Poster Edges
	Reduces the number of colors in an image (posterizes) according to the posterization option you set, and finds the edges of the image and draws black lines on them. Large broad areas of the image have simple shading, while fine dark detail is distributed throughout the image.
	Wind Filter
	Creates tiny horizontal lines in the image to simulate a wind effect. Methods include Wind; Blast, for a more dramatic wind effect; and Stagger, which offsets the wind lines in the image.
	Texture (Brick) Filter
	Paints an image onto a high-relief surface resembling a brick wall, producing a network of strong rows with interspersing vertical divisions. Use this filter to create an embossing effect with images that contain a broad range of color or grayscale values.
	Conté Crayon
	Replicates the texture of dense dark and pure white Conté crayons on an image. The Conté Crayon filter uses the foreground color for dark areas and the background color for light areas. For a truer effect, change the foreground color to one of the common Conté Crayon colors (black, sepia, sanguine) before applying. For a muted effect, change the background color to white with some foreground color added to it.
	Mosaic (Pixelate) Filter
	For those times when you just have to clean it clean. The Mosaic filter clumps pixels into square blocks. The pixels in a given block are the same color, and the colors of the blocks represent the colors in the selection.
	Chalk & Charcoal
	Redraws an image's highlights and midtones with a solid midtone gray back-ground drawn in coarse chalk. Shadow areas are replaced with black diagonal charcoal lines. The charcoal is drawn in the foreground color, the chalk in background color.
	Diffuse Glow
	Renders an image as though it were viewed through a soft diffusion filter. The filter adds see-through white noise to an image, with the glow fading from the center of a selection.
	Emboss
	Makes a selection appear raised or stamped by converting its fill color to gray and tracing the edges with the original fill color. Options include an embossing angle (from -360° to lower (stamp) the surface, to +360° to raise the surface), height, and a percentage (1% to 500%) for the amount of color within the selection. To retain color and detail when embossing, use the Fade command after applying the Emboss filter.
	Ink Outline
	Redraws an image with fine narrow lines over the original details, in pen-and-ink style.

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