Software Reviews
Filter Forge 2.0
Reviewed by d.a.w DESIGN
Filter Forge 2.0 is a cool powerful Adobe Photoshop / Adobe Elements and Coral plug–in, also a stand–alone application for Windows and Mac OS X that allows designer/artists/photographers to build custom filters to enhance images. Types of filters include seamless textures, visual effects, distortions, patterns, backgrounds, frames and more.
Figure 01 – Interface.
Not really much as changed in the appearance of the interface, it’s pretty much the same apart from a new lighting tab and the option to search for filters.So what’s new?
Filter Forge 2.0 – What's New
Filter Forge 2.0 features new lighting options and shadows via ambient occlusion, support for scripting and over 40 new components for creating filters, full HDR support that drastically enhances the level of realism, and much more. Photoshop CS5 and Elements 7 have been added as supported host applications.
Shadows: via Ambient Occlusion
To apply Ambient / Reflective Occlusion to a filter, you don't have to change its internals. The only thing you need to do is to make sure that the filter in question is a Surface–type filter (any filter that has the Lighting tab). To access the occlusion settings, open the Lighting tab and select the Ambience band around the environment sphere. It dramatically enhances the level of realism.
Point/Area Lights
Filter Forge 2.0 allows you to create any number of point or area lights that allow you to specify how exactly you want your texture to be lit.
Multiple HDR Lights
In Filter Forge 2.0, you can create any number of light sources which support unlimited HDR colors and work together with other Filter Forge lighting methods.
Negative Light
The new HDR pipeline allows negative RGB channel values, and since the lights use HDR colors, you can pick a negative color for a light! The primary use of negative lights is "sucking out" the light added by other light sources, HDRI environment or ambient lighting which helps you create deeper, darker shadows.
New Lighting Options
Improving upon the already impressive lighting capabilities of its previous version, Filter Forge 2.0 introduces a set of new options that give you more creative freedom in lighting design:
• Shadowing via ambient and reflective occlusion.
• Point and area lights.
• Ambient lighting (supports HDR colors, can be negative).
• Brightness multiplier extended to 1000% (was 500%).
• Full 360° lighting environment rotation.
• Ability to rotate the environment along horizontal and vertical axes separately.
• Ability to reset environment rotation.
Redesigned Lighting Interface
Completely redesigned Lighting tab in Filter Controls. The new interface allows you to adjust all lighting elements – HDRI environment, surface height, point/area lights, ambient lighting, and ambient occlusion by using a simple unified interface. The new lighting control represents the entire lighting setup as several selectable elements, with the properties for the selected element displayed below the control.
Selecting the HDRI Environment sphere lets you adjust environment parameters such as rotation and brightness, as well as Surface Height:
Figure 02 – Lighting Tab.
Selecting the Ambience band around the environment sphere lets you adjust the color of the Ambient Light and parameters of ambient and reflective occlusion. Selecting any of the Lights lets you adjust their colors and properties.
Figure 03 – Changing the light color.
Full HDR Support
Filter Forge 2.0 officially supports high dynamic range (HDR) colors across its entire rendering pipeline, from input images through components to rendered results.
HDR-Compatible Components
Over 60% of components in Filter Forge 2.0 have been rewritten to support HDR colors. Many familiar operations like, Blur, High Pass, Blend, Levels and Perlin Noise and many more.
HDR Color Picker
When you turn the new HDR checkbox on, the Color Picker lets you enter RGB colors with unlimited channel values. From now on, you are free to use colors as bright and vibrant as you want.
Color Inspector
With the introduction of RGB math and HDR–mappable Transform components in Filter Forge 2.0, a problem became apparent – it is very difficult to debug and fine–tune complex filters without built–in debugging tools that can show RGB output of components as numbers. To remedy this, Filter Forge 2.0 introduces a Color Inspector that shows the exact RGB output values of any map component, right in the Filter Editor! The Color Inspector fully supports unlimited HDR colors and can show any value – huge or small, positive or negative. To use the Color Inspector, select the new eyedropper button above the preview – or simply hold Shift – and click anywhere in the preview area:
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