Indigo

Yesterday had a look at the Photo techniques forum. Someone had just posted there about the Find Edges filter as well. What he did was just put a pixel dot on the canvas and then started hitting Find Edges (control F) 40 times or so. He came up with very interesting patterns.
So, i played with that for a while and tried a dot, box, and other simple shapes and you end up with fascinating stuff.
After reading the posts here, worked with the wave filter and that randomizer does make it interesting.

markm

do blending modes count?.... I use a lot of them...

the Gaussian Blur, Motion Blur, Add Noise and Polar Coordinates.... they are the only true Filters I use now... when I hear the word 'Filter' ... my head thinks 'shortcut' ... which inturn makes me uneasy. perhaps I just can't use them effectively?... It's almost and art by themselves.

Bacardi

in my opinion, some of the really fascinating filters are the lesser known ones like highpass, maximum and minimum.
I'll try to prepare something about them.
Then you have the displacement filter etc etc...
So much to discover...

atty_a

iono about you guys but i like gaussian blur.. can't live without it

kiwi

Ya I am a big fan of g blur as well


Another filter not be underestimated is craquelure........I call it the mud filter because I always forget its true name


Stu.

?esktop

Until I discovered the Magic Eraser I was always pulling my hair out as how to eliminate backgrounds from images. You can get the same results using Knock-Out and Quick Mask, but with the Magic Eraser I can eliminate almost all of the background with one click.

A great filter is Mac's Remove White. Got an image you want to remove from a white background? No problem. One click of Mac's Remove White and viloa' ! After you remove the white just create another layer below your image, fill with your background color, then merge the two layers together. Save your image a transparent GIF and your done.

Another feature of the Selection Tool that I find cool is when you are making a selection of any kind you can hold the spacebar down and move the selection around until it is positioned where you want it. After using Paint Shop Pro for a while I came to really appreciate this feature.

Bacardi

Just to add: you can also use the blending sliders to remove white and much more...:

1/ open or make the image you want to use as background
2/ open the image of which you want to remove the white (or black or...) and drag it on the background. It will open as a new layer.
3/ double click the name of layer1 so as to open the layer styles palette.
4/ drag the slider(s) of the New Layer Slider. The left one makes the black towards grey areas disappear, the right one will make the white towards grey disappear.

The advantage of this slider is that you can avoid the jaggies: Alt dragging/Option dragging causes the slider triangle to split in two, and all shades that are between the two halves will become partially transparant.

Don't forget though that any colour is composed of the three basics R,G and B and that these individually behave as greyscale images. This means that some colours may really shift. PS gives you the option to choose between Grey and your channels to give you more control.

The other slider will make parts of the underluing image visible. Its slider triangles can also be split in two in the same manner.

kiwi

Another one I find invaluable for retouching is hit the return key with your airbrush/paintbrush or other tool selected which uses the brushes palette and your brush palette appears,move your cursor to the right hand side of your monitor and hit return and voila the brush palette appears just where you place your cursor .

It can be very useful sometimes having your brush palette on the right hand side of your monitor instead of in its default position


Stu.

The Gaussian blur of course

kiwi

Did you know the Gaussian blur was actually invented by Mr Gaussian .....not sure of his profession etc,but I know it was designed by a guy called Gaussian


Stu.