The Filter menu groups filters into 14 main categories. Correct Camera Distortion (Correcting Lens Distortion) is all by itself at the top of the list. You’ll also see a divider below the bottom category (called Other). When you first install Elements, the Digimarc filter is the only filter below this line, but other filters you download or purchase will appear here, too.

When you choose a filter from the list, one of three things happens:

Regardless of how you’ve applied the filter, once you’re done, you can always undo it (Ctrl+Z) if you’re not happy with the effect. If you like it, then there’s no need to do anything else, except of course to eventually save your image.

If you’re more comfortable with visual clues when choosing a filter, then you can also find most filters in the Effects palette (Figure 13-2), which is, logically enough, also where you apply effects.

Figure 13-2. The Effects palette gives you a preview of what every filter looks like when applied to the same picture of a green apple. Click the Filters button (circled), and then, from the pull-down menu, choose a category. If you know what you want a filter to do but don’t know what name to look for, scrolling through these thumbnail images should help locate the one you want. To apply a filter from the palette, double-click the thumbnail, or click the thumbnail once and then click Apply. You can also drag the filter’s thumbnail from the palette onto your image.

The Effects palette is one of the palettes in the Palette bin the first time you launch Elements. If it’s not there waiting for you, go to Window → Effects, and then click the Filters button. Choose a Filter category from the pull-down menu or choose Show All. The categories are the same ones you see in the Filter menu, except that Adjustments is available only through the menu, and Sharpen appears in the palette but not the Filter menu.

To apply a filter from the palette, double-click its thumbnail, or drag the thumbnail onto your image. If the filter has adjustable settings, you see the same dialog box or Filter Gallery you’d see when applying the filter from the Filter menu, as described earlier.

One small drawback to applying filters from the palette is that you can’t tell from the thumbnail whether a filter is one that applies automatically, with no adjustable settings. Elements doesn’t give you any clue like an ellipsis (…) to tell you which group a filter falls into.

The Filter Gallery, shown in Figure 13-3, is one of Elements’ more popular features. It gives you a large preview window, a look at all the little green apple thumbnails so you have a visual guide to what your filter will do, and, most important, it lets you apply filters like layers—you can stack them up and change the order in which they’re applied to your image. Changing the order of filters can make some big differences in how they affect your image. For example, you get very different results if you apply Ink Outlines after the Sprayed Strokes filter compared to the other way around. The Gallery makes it easy to play around and see which order gives you the look you want. The layer-like behavior of the filters in the gallery is only for previewing, though—you don’t end up with real layers.

Figure 13-3. The Filter Gallery. If you want an even larger preview, then click the arrow that the cursor is over in the figure to collapse the thumbnails and regain that entire section for preview space.

The Gallery is more for artistic filters than corrective filters. You can’t apply the Adjustment or Noise filters from the Gallery, for instance. All the Gallery filters are in the artistic, brushstroke, distort, sketch, stylize, and texture categories. (See the next section for an overview of all the filter categories.)

The Filter Gallery is divided into three panes. On the left side is a preview of what your image will look like when you apply the filter. The center holds the thumbnails for the different filters, and the right side contains the settings for the currently chosen filter. Your filter layers are at the bottom of the settings pane. You can see what filters you’ve applied, add or subtract layers, and rearrange their order here.

In addition to letting you adjust the settings for a given filter, the Filter Gallery lets you perform a few other tricks:

Noise, the appearance of undesired graininess in an image, is a big problem with many digital cameras, especially those with small sensors and high megapixel counts. It’s rare to find a fixed-lens camera with more than 5 megapixels that doesn’t have some trouble with noise, especially in underexposed areas. If you shoot using the Raw format, then you can correct a fair amount of noise right in the Raw Converter (Adjusting Vibrance and Saturation). But the Raw Converter may give unpredictable results if you use it on JPEGs. And even Raw files may need further noise reduction once you’ve edited your photo after converting it.

Elements includes the Reduce Noise filter, which is designed specifically to help get rid of noise in your photos. To get to it, go to Filter → Noise → Reduce Noise. You get a dialog box with a preview window on the left and settings adjustments on the right. To use the filter, first use the controls below the preview to set the view to at least 100 percent, or preferably even higher. You need to see the pixels in your photo so you can see how the filter is changing them as you adjust the settings.

You get three settings, each of which you control by using a slider:

You also have a checkbox for minimizing JPEG artifacts—the uneven areas of color caused by JPEG compression (see About JPEGs). A mottled pattern in what should be a clear blue sky is one classic example of JPEG artifacting that you may have experienced. Turn on the checkbox to help smooth things out.

For each setting, move the slider to the right if you want more and to the left if you want less; watch the effect in the preview window to see how you like the changes. You may notice a little lag time before the preview updates. When you see what you want, click OK to apply the filter.

The Elements Reduce Noise filter does an OK job on areas with a small amount of noise, like the sky in many JPEG photos, but it’s not one of the strongest tools in Elements. If your camera has major noise problems, you may find you still need third-party noise reduction software. Some of the most popular programs are Noise Ninja (www.picturecode.com), Neat Image (www.neatimage.com), and Noiseware (www.imagenomic.com). All have demo versions you can download to try out the programs. If you search on Google for “noise reduction software,” you’ll get a variety of other options as well, including several free programs.

Elements also gives you a filter for creating noise. Why do that when most of the time you try so hard to get rid of noise? One reason is when you’re trying to age the appearance of your photo. If you wanted to make a photo look like it came from an old newspaper, for instance, you’d add some noise.

The other most common use for noise is to help make repaired spots blend in with the rest of an image. If you’ve altered part of a photo in Elements, especially by painting on it, odds are the repaired area is going to look perfectly smooth. That’s great if the rest of the photo is noise free. But if the rest of the photo is a little grainy, that smooth patch is going to stand out like a sore thumb. Add a bit of noise to make it blend in better with the rest of the photo, as shown in Figure 13-5. Also, if you see color banding when you print, adding a little noise to the photo may help fix that in your next print.

Figure 13-5. Left: If you use the Average Blur filter in a repair on this noisy photo, the blended area stands out, making the repaired area obvious. Right: By adding some noise, the changes become much less noticeable.

To add noise to a photo, start by selecting the area where you want to add the noise. Using a duplicate layer (Ctrl+J) for the noise is a safe step, since you can always undo changes if you’ve got them on a layer.

You have three options in the Add Noise dialog box:

Noise can also help when you want to apply special effects to blocks of solid color, as shown in Figure 13-7. If you try to apply the Angled Strokes filter to a solid color, then you don’t see the strokes. Adding noise gives the filter something to work on.

Figure 13-6. Filters can really spruce up solid objects. Top: An unfiltered solid red heart, drawn with the Shape tool (Drawing with Shapes). Middle: Here’s the same heart after adding some Uniform noise to it. Bottom: Adding the Angled Strokes filter gives the heart a hand-painted look. If you don’t add noise before applying the filter, then you won’t see any texture change from the top graphic when applying the filter.

Probably the most frequently used of the Blur filters, the Gaussian Blur filter lets you control how much an image is blurred. Besides using it to blur large areas of a photo, like the background in Figure 13-7, bottom, you can apply the Gaussian Blur filter at a very low setting to soften lines—very useful when trying to achieve a sketched effect. If you’d like to try out the different blurs, download the hawk photo (hawk.jpg) from the Missing CD page at www.missingmanuals.com.

When using the Gaussian Blur, you have to set the radius, which controls how much the filter blurs things. A higher radius produces more blurring; use the filter’s preview window to see what you’re doing.

As you can see in Figure 13-8, the Radial Blur really produces a sense of motion. It has two available styles: Zoom, which is designed to give the effect of a camera zooming in, and Spin, which produces a circular effect around your designated center point.

The Radial Blur dialog box may look a bit complicated, but it’s really not. Unfortunately, you don’t get a preview with this filter, because it drains so much processor power. That’s why you have a choice between Draft, Good, and Best Quality. Use Draft for a quick look at roughly what you’ll get. Then, most of the time, choose Good for the final version. Good and Best aren’t very different except on large images, so don’t feel that you must choose Best for the final version all the time.

Figure 13-7. Top: This photo could use some help from the Blur filters. The hawk is hard to distinguish from the rest of the photo; blurring helps center the focus on the hawk. Bottom: With a Gaussian Blur filter applied to the background, the hawk becomes the photo’s clear focal point.

Figure 13-8. A Radial Blur applied in Zoom mode. As you can see, this filter can produce an almost vertiginous sense of motion. If you don’t want to give people motion sickness, go easy on the Amount setting.

Once you’ve chosen your method (Zoom or Spin), set the amount, which controls the intensity of the blur that’s applied. Next, click inside the Blur Center box to identify the point where you want the blur to center, as shown in Figure 13-9. Finally, click OK when you’re finished.

Figure 13-9. The Blur Center box lets you identify the center point of the Radial Blur’s effect (whether you’ve chosen Zoom or Spin mode). Drag the ripple drawing inside the box in any direction; here, the center point has been moved just to the right and down from its original position in the center of the box.

If you’ve already given the Average Blur filter a whirl, then you may be wondering what on earth Adobe was thinking when they created it. Use it on your entire photo, and your image disappears under a hideous soup, something like what you’d get by pureeing together all the colors in your photo. Oddly enough, this effect makes the filter a great tool for getting rid of color casts (Removing Unwanted Color). You can use the Average Blur to create a sort of custom Photo Filter (Photo Filter) toned specially for the image you use it on. The secret is in using blend modes (Blend Mode). Here’s how:

The Average Blur filter is a particularly good way to color-correct underwater photos, where it’s very hard to get a realistic white balance using your camera’s built-in settings.

Elements 7 brings yet another way to blur your photos—the Surface Blur filter. At this point you may be thinking that you have enough ways to eliminate details in your photos, but the Surface Blur filter is actually very handy, especially if you take pictures of people. The Surface Blur filter is smart enough to avoid blurring details and areas of high contrast, which makes it very handy for fixing skin. If you want to eliminate pores, for instance, or reduce the visibility of freckles, this is your tool, as shown in Figure 13-10, and it’s pretty simple to use, too:

Figure 13-10. The new Surface Blur filter is a very handy tool for creating better looking skin, minimizing lines and flaws, or reducing the visibility of pores. Top: The original photo. Bottom: A dose of Surface blur evens out fine lines in the skin and preserves individual hairs that have good definition. But if you look closely, the areas of hair with less definition got blurred along with the skin. In cases like that, use a selection to limit where the blur gets applied.

The Surface Blur filter isn’t at all hard to understand, but you usually have to do a fair amount of fiddling with the sliders to get the best balance for the blur effect. Here’s what the sliders do:

To apply a gradient with the Gradient tool, first make a selection if you don’t want to see the gradient in your whole image. Then:

To get started using the Gradient Editor, first choose your gradient’s type and smoothness settings:

Figure 13-21. The powerful and complex Gradient Editor. Here, the aqua-colored Stop (where the cursor is) has been clicked to make it active. The colored triangle on the Stop is Elements’ way of telling you it’s the active Stop. The two tiny diamonds on either side of the active Stop control the location of the midpoint of the transition between the selected color and its neighbors.

Most of the work you do in the Gradient Editor takes place in the Gradient bar, the long colored bar where your chosen gradient is displayed. The little boxes (also called stops) and diamonds surrounding the Gradient bar let you control the color and transparency of your gradient.

For now, you care only about the stops beneath the Gradient bar. Each is a Color Stop; it represents where a particular color falls in the gradient. You always need at least two Color Stops in a gradient.

If you click a stop, then the pointed end becomes colored, letting you know that it’s the active stop. Anything you do at this point is going to affect the area governed by that stop. You can slide the stops around to change where the colors transition in your gradients. The Color Stops let you customize your gradient in lots of different ways. Using them, you can:

You can also use the Gradient Editor to adjust the transparency in a gradient. Elements gives you nearly unlimited control over the transparency in your gradients, and the opacity of any color at any point in the gradient. Adjusting opacity in the Gradient Editor works very much like using the Color Stops to edit the colors. Instead of Color Stops, you use Opacity Stops.

The Opacity Stops are the little boxes above the Gradient bar. You can move an Opacity Stop to wherever you want, and then adjust the transparency by using the settings in the Gradient Editor’s Stops section. Click the Gradient bar wherever you want to add more Opacity Stops (click above the Gradient bar, rather than in it). The more Opacity Stops your Gradient bar has, the more points you have at which you can adjust your gradient’s opacity.

Here’s how to add an Opacity Stop, and then adjust its opacity setting:

By adding stops, you can make your gradient fade in and out, as shown in the background of Figure 13-22, which shows a simple vertical blue to transparent linear gradient that’s been edited so that it fades in and out a few times.

Figure 13-22. You can make a gradient fade in and out like this background by adding more Opacity stops and reducing the opacity level of each stop.

Elements also lets you create what Adobe calls noise gradients. A noise gradient isn’t speckled (as you might expect if you’re thinking of camera noise). Instead, noise gradients randomly distribute their colors within the range you specify, giving a banded or spectrometer-like effect to the gradient. The effect is interesting, but noise gradients can be a bit unpredictable. The noisier a gradient is, the more stripes of the colors you see, and the greater the number of random colors.

You can create a noise gradient by clicking the More button (the arrow at the upper right) on the Options bar gradient pop-out menu, and then, in the pop-out list of categories, selecting Noise Samples. Or you can click the Edit button to bring up the Gradient Editor, and then choose Noise as your Gradient Type.

Noise gradients have some special settings of their own in the Gradient Editor: