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Adobe Photoshop CC - Essentials Training

How to add filters & effects in Adobe Photoshop

Daniel Walter Scott

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Hi there, in this video we're going to introduce the Filters in Photoshop. More specifically, this thing here called the Filter Gallery, and all of its magic inside. Let's get going. 
Let's get started by going to 'File', let's go to 'Open'. In your 'Exercise Files', we're going to a new folder now called '06 Filters'. Open that up. Let's open up 'Filter Gallery 01'. Who is this handsome man, you ask? It's me, looking casual with my hands in my pockets. So Filters are all in here. Click on 'Filter', now there's a bunch to go through so we're not going to go through them all but the best way to get started is to use this thing called the Filter Gallery. Kind of yanks up all of these, who knows, what Pixelate Mosaic is? 
So it's best to go into the Filter Gallery, and it gives you kind of a preview. Now it's set to the last thing we did. Yours is probably going to be set to Colored Pencil, or Cutout, or Fresno. And the creepiest one of them all, Plastic Wrap. You can adjust them over here, often it's just a string. Just kind of different changes depending on the particular effect or filter you have selected. Now before we go any further, just so you know, like Colored Pencil shows it up quite heavily. If we go down to here, to say, not Brushstroke, Distort, Sketch does. This is black and white one, you're like, "That's not black and white." What ends up happening-- yours is probably black and white, let's say I'm going to pick charcoal. Let's click 'OK'. Why is it getting this green and this magenta? If I click 'OK', what it's doing is it's using your foreground and background color, and your foreground and background color is probably like this. I just click this little reset button. It's probably black and white, so that's where it got those two colors from. 
So if you're like me, you want those colors, what you can do before you go into the filters, I'm going to 'Edit', 'Undo'. Click on the 'black', and just click in here, drag this 'Hue Slider' up until I find a color I want. Same with the Background color, there's white box here, click on that. And instead of white I'm going to pick another color. Spent ages picking a color, I did. 
Another thing you need to do when you're using filters is, what you might have noticed, if I go redo again, there's an option in here to go-- so I would Step backward, and there's a way to go Step Forward to back to where I had it. The problem with it is, down here I've done what's called Destructive Editing. It means that layer's changed forever, if I save over the top of this now, there will never be a colored version of me again. It will just be this version, so it’s destructive. So what we want to do is do a little step before we go in. So here we go back to the beginning. 
So before you go into 'Filter Gallery', click on this one here, 'Convert for Smart Filters'. Nothing really happens; click 'OK'. Except the icon changes down here, the thumbnail has this little graphic in the corner. That's just to mean, it's what's called a Smart Object. We'll go through Smart Objects in a little bit more detail later on but for the moment, with it selected go to the same thing, 'Filter', 'Filter Gallery'. Here's all my awesome colors. Now again, we're not going to go through them all, there is a-- we'll go through Half Tone Pattern in a next tutorial but for the moment, go through, have a little experiment with the different ones. There's some cool ones in Texture. And remember, you can adjust them over here. 
So once you have done something-- I've done my Grain. No, Patchwork, let's click 'OK'. See the difference down here, it looks kind of complicated but we've kind of seen stuff like this before when we did our Drop Shadows from down here, right? It means that my layer is fine, and perfect, and non-destroyed. Means I can turn the Filter Gallery on and off. It also means I can double click the word Filter Gallery to go back in. And you go, actually I liked it, but the square size needs to be bigger. More pixelated Dan, less pixelated Dan. Click 'OK'. And we've made that amends, we can always turn it off. Now this is a brief introduction to the Filter Gallery. We'll, in the next couple of tutorials show you some actually specific kind of looks, and show you how to go through using the Filter Gallery to create them. Until that next video; I will see you later.