Photoshop Interface Tutorial: The Filter Menu

Blur, Sharpen, Extract, Liquify, Vanishing Point, Distort, Render, and More

In this Photoshop tutorial, we'll look at Photoshop's Filter Menu.

Photoshop's Filter Menu is often times the first place people go when they start learning Photoshop because it's a great place to have fun clicking on things and turning your images into whacky works of art without having the first clue what it is you're doing. Who among us could resist the urge to convert a family photo into a colored pencil drawing, or give it an ocean ripple effect, or even better, a lens flare, all at the click of a button! Yes, Photoshop's filters and effects can be a virtual playground of fun. Keep in mind though that while a few randomly applied filter effects may be enough to impress your friends, people who've been using Photoshop for any decent length of time will spot those canned effects in an instant. Having said that, by all means, feel free to sit back, relax, and explore Photoshop's Filter Menu to your heart's content. Try not to focus too much on the names of the filters though. Focus more on what kinds of effects you actually get out of them. You may find that the Plastic Wrap effect doesn't really look much like plastic wrap, yet it may be just the thing you're looking for when creating an entirely different effect. There's far too many filters and effects in the Filter Menu to cover them all. However, two of the filters you'll find here are ones that you'll use almost every time you work on an image inside Photoshop - "Gaussian Blur" and "Unsharp Mask". Let's take a closer look at them.

Gaussian Blur

Located in the "Blur" options is one of the most widely used filters in all of Photoshop, "Gaussian Blur". Its popularity stems from the fact that, while there are other blur filters available such as, well, "Blur" and "Blur More", these simple effects give you no control over what you're doing, and no preview either. The Gaussian Blur option gives you both control over the effect and a preview of what it's going to look like. You can set the amount of blur you're applying by dragging the slider at the bottom of the dialog box left and right, which changes the pixel value inside the radius box above it. And you're given a nice big preview window to preview the effect before you click "OK" and apply it. You can even zoom in and out in the preview window, and check or uncheck the Preview checkbox in the top right of the dialog box to turn the preview on and off.

Unsharp Mask

Located in the "Sharpen" options, the "Unsharp Mask" filter is another of Photoshop's filters that you will use on a daily basis As with "Gaussian Blur", "Unsharp Mask" is so useful because it gives us so much control over the sharpening effect, plus it gives us a large preview area so we can see what we're doing to our image before applying the effect. Unsharp Mask works by increasing the contrast between pixels to give the illusion that the image is becoming sharper. You can adjust the amount of "sharpening" with the Amount slider, adjust the radius of the region to which each pixel is compared for brightness values with the Radius slider, and you can adjust how much of a difference in brightness values there has to be between pixels before those pixels are af