CyberNotes: Advanced Photo Effects

Feb 26

CyberNotes: Advanced Photo Effects

Time Saving Tuesday

One of the reasons Adobe Photoshop has become so popular is because of all the advanced photo affects that can be applied to images. Over the last few years I’ve seen a lot of free alternatives emerge onto the scene saving users hundreds of dollars, but many of them don’t have the effects and control that I’m looking for.

The tool that we found for you today is called PhotoFiltre, and it is completely free just like most of the software we write about. It’s far from becoming a Photoshop replacement, but I’ve found that it is extremely handy at applying effects and touching up the digital photos that you have lying around. Lets look at some of the things that it can do…

(Click to Enlarge)

–Features–

There are over 100 filters available including ones for standard adjustments (brightness, saturation, etc…) and even artistic ones (watercolor, puzzle effect, etc…). We’ll get into these more in the next section of the article.
You can select portions of an image with an automatic shape (rectangle, ellipse, triangle, rhombus, rounded rectangle) or with the lasso, magic wand, and polygon tools.
Well-organized toolbars make it easy to switch between the most used tools.
PhotoMasque lets you create advanced effects of contour and transparency on your images by using preset masks. These masks are grayscale images, where white is the transparancy color, while opacity increases as the shades of gray become darker. Black means complete opacity. There are several basic masks included.
The Automatisation module lets you apply basic functions/corrections (conversion, image size, framing) to a group of images.
Advanced text effects are available including rotation, shading, and bevel.
Assemble and blend multiple images.
Automatic photo corrections that enhance your images so that they look the best.
Free plug-ins add even more functionality including red eye removal, animated GIF importing, page curl effect, gradients, screen capture, and much more.

–Effects–

One of my favorite things with the PhotoFiltre application is the wide array of special filters that’s available. I wanted demonstrate what some of the filters can do, so here are some examples using the image pictured in the screenshot above as the starting ground:

(more…)

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