Installs additional effects into Adobe Photoshop and gives access to more than 12000 textures. Features a built-in online repository for easy installation.
Professional designers, photographers, and computer creatives will find in Filter Forge a high-end professional utility to produce their own image filters, effects, and textures. This is not a tool for beginners, even though it has been designed to be as intuitive as possible for all kind of users. It requires a powerful computer with plenty of resources, and it can be used as a stand-alone tool or as a Photoshop plug-in.
The program comes with an extensive library of textures and filters, with thousands of designs that you can customize to your own liking or fit the requirements of your next project, thus enlarging the existing database with your own creations. Filters are divided into two main categories – textures and effects, and each of them includes around half a dozen subcategories, such as frames, organic, stone, or techno for the textures, and distortion, creative, or photo for the effects. Under these two main subcategories, you’ll find all the factory presets that you can use to produce your own filter using the filter editor.
The possibilities are endless – the program’s filter editor also comes with custom filters that you can modify and adapt to fit your needs. It is a node-based environment, where joining and combining textures and effects is as simple as selecting, dragging, and merging those node-like effects at the desired location within the tree-like structure that the program creates for every filter.
Filter Forge is fully compatible with the latest versions of Photoshop (including the latest CC 2019), Corel Photo-Paint and Paint Shop Pro, Serif PhotoPlus, Affinity Photo, etc. It supports only the latest versions of Windows (from 7 onwards) and requires a 64-bit PC with as much RAM and hard drive as you can afford. Its tag price is also on the “professional” side.
v3.0 [Jul 5, 2011]
1.Support for Multiple Source Images
In Filter Forge 1.0 and 2.0, one could only use a single source image or a Photoshop layer at a time. Starting with version 3.0, Filter Forge allows you to use multiple source images simultaneously. This is implemented by allowing you to load images into Color Controls and the newly introduced Grayscale Controls via the filter interface.
2.Progressive Previews
The idea behind progressive previews is to give you a rough, low-resolution preview of the rendered image as fast as possible, then gradually refine it in subsequent rendering passes until the image reaches the final level of quality. By default, the first rendering pass of the progressive preview is up to 16 times faster than the original preview method!
3.More Preview Images
If you are a longtime Filter Forge user, you're probably sick and tired of the default lifesaver image that Filter Forge uses to preview rendered results – and so are we! Filter Forge 3.0 comes with 6 new preview images so you can choose the one that you like best. Each of these images comes with an alpha channel allowing you to preview your filters on images with transparent areas.
4.Flexible UI with Resizable Panels
The most prominent innovation in the final beta stage is the flexible user interface with draggable separators. Owners of widescreen monitors will benefit from this most.
5.Interactive Before/After Wipe
Filter Forge 3.0 improves interactivity when applying effect filters. We've implemented an interactive slider allowing users to see the original image and the applied effect at a time.
6.Bézier Curves
Bézier curves are commonly used for creating tone curves, bevel profiles and other shapes. With Filter Forge 3.0, you can draw Bézier curves within the new Bézier Curve component that features a powerful curve editor.
7.Edge Detector Component
The new Edge Detector component performs edge detection, similar to certain existing filters in the filter library but faster and in a single shot. The component is highly adjustable and can output HDR colors.
8.Script API for Noise and Blending Modes
Filter Forge 3.0 offers expanded scripting API that adds support for Perlin and uniform noise functions and allows access to the blending modes in scripts.
9.Other Improvements
Filter Forge 3.0 includes several other improvements, which include hexadecimal color values in the Color Picker, HDR and alpha channel support for filter controls, high-precision Color Inspector, the ability to load recently-used images, a unified Bomber component and more.
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