Photoshop: Using Distort Filters

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I am going to go back to file, open and let us open up stock home at night. This is another Bryan Maffet masterpiece that he took in stock home and this photo just mesmerizes me. He has taken it a beautiful time of evening and the colors and the architecture are just unbelievable. So in this segment we are going to talk about the distort area of the filters.

Under filter, if we go to distort we will see that there is a whole sub menu of just things that distort. Now before we go there, I just want to make a couple things clear. A lot of times with the distort sub menu those filters will completely ruin your image, the will maybe make pond ripples that will make your image unrecognizable. But a lot of times what I like to do since it does that, you start with an image like this that has some very gorgeous color to it and then when we mix those colors all together with one of those distort filters we have a very beautiful result.

The other thing I want to mention before we get started is that some filters are in what is called the filter gallery. You see, back in the day, they are used to be all this artistic filters and what not, brush strokes, style lies and there is this huge list of filters and it is impossible to remember what each one does. And a lot of times their names are a little bit non-descriptive, they do not tell you that much about what the filter does. So often times you would try out a filter and it would not be what you want. Well at times it is a very frustrating process.

Well a few version of photo ago they introduced what is called the filter gallery. So let us see I go up the artistic sub menu and I select cut out. I get this dialogue box that not only that gives me the cut out options but also gives me many other filters from which to browse. So I can see the results of the cut out filter here which I think are just gorgeous, that new super trendy vector look, but let us say I open it up and I said :Oh, you know what that is actually not I wanted. I wanted pallet knife.? I could just click on pallet knife or click on under painting or go to different menu even to store it and we can click on ocean ripple.

So now I can basically apply most filters from one dialogue box. This is amazingly handy and resourceful and it is actually ocean ripple that we wanted, so I can change here the ripple size making it just kind like you are looking at it through a rainy window or I can make this bigger and change the ripple magnitude. This is a little bit less recognizable but still the same time we are getting some pretty realistic looking reflections here in this water effect.

Some pretty gorgeous things you can do with this effect. I am going to hit cancel, I do not want to apply that and actually there is a better way to apple a pond type ripple effect to your image, now I will cover that a little bit later on in this very segment. Just cover some other distort features here, under filter, distort, I am going to select polar coordinates. And what polar coordinates does is that it takes the two sides of an image, let us say the left side of and the right side and wraps them around each other so that they are polar coordinates instead of rectangular coordinates.
Polar rectangular is basically the opposite if you had a round image and then you want to straighten it out to a rectangular image but often and not you will select rectangular to polar. Hit okay and we will get this really interesting effect. And you can imagine now how cool would be if we went up to the filter menu and on top of this we went to filter blur radial blur added some zoom blur. Bump that up quite a bit, hit okay and look at that.

Now we are not going too much into adding effects one on top of the other right now. there is a segment a little bit later on in this lesson devoted specifically to that topic and I do not want to steal my own thunder. But, just to get your brain working a little bit if we start playing around with these colors and added some image color effects and what not we can make some really amazing art work using the colors of this original image and the filters inside of photo shop.

So I am going to hit command Z to undo that, command alt Z to undo it again and we are back to square one. Under filter, distort I could also select spear eyes. This is great if you want to create like a crystal ball type effect so I am going to hit okay and so we have this distorted looking ball that kind of bulges in the center as if you were looking through a crystal ball or something.

So all that your imagination run wild on where you could use this and your work float, I am going to hit command Z to undo that and finally just in our whorl wind tour here of distort filters let us go to zigzag. And the reason why I want to show you zigzag is because it is kind of miss no a little bit. You think zigzag and well I do not use zigzag that often I do not know about you. But, what I really cool about the zigzag dialogue is we can change the style. And we can have them zigzagging what not but pond ripples really are the star of the show inside the zigzag dialogue box.

Pond ripples are just absolutely beautiful, so I could hit okay here and then we come back and then we have this pond ripple effects. Maybe we can distort this image or free transform it and then put it on a bed of water as if it were reflecting. There are just some gorgeous things you can do here. Maybe we could run this effect on this image again and distort it even more so it is completely un-recognizable and just use the beautiful colors in it for some other artistic purpose.

Now there are many other distort effects, these are just the ones that I use most often and then I think there are the most beneficial for new users. There are many more to play with and experiment with and I find it that the distort filters are actually very creative but you just have to take the time to experiment and play with them.