Filter Forge

Image manipulations are being performed like never before with ample amount of tools coming up for decorative and styling purposes that help the users to play with their photos as they want and even providing graphical artists a broad scope to work up on varied images and design spectacular web pages. Photoshop is a program without which any web designer or computer artist can do justice to his work of being stylishly creative and produce good work for clients that would bring about a novel pattern in their portfolio. Further, numerous plug-ins have come up nowadays that help Photoshop users to perform necessary editing and distortions for comfort and Filter Forge 1.009 is another addition to the list with its allows building up filters for textures and patterns in a convenient manner.

Filter Forge upon launch opens with a compact looking yet neatly aligned interface with the chief options placed at the left pane and at the wherein the user can navigate through the available controls and assist computer artists to build their personalized filters by which they can create seamless textures, distortions and visual effects along with frames and patterns. The program is designed to produce nice looking patterns and textures like rocky surfaces, metallic surfaces, repeating patterns and color corrections and a lot more. All the created filters are flexible enough to be adjusted and are resolution independent too that can be useful for manifold purposes. The rendering engine of the program takes full advantage of the multi-core processes and end results can be saved into high precision image formats like OpenEXR.

To sum up, Filter Forge 1.009 comes across as a practical and useful utility that would definitely offer valuable assistance to designers working with Photoshop and hence gets a rating of four points for its impressive performance.

Filter Forge Professional is a high-end plugin for Adobe Photoshop allowing computer artists to build their own filters – seamless textures, visual effects, distortions, patterns, backgrounds, frames, and more. Filter Forge can produce a wide range of textures and effects which include organic structures, metallic and rocky surfaces, distortions, abstract textures, repeating patterns, color corrections, and more. All filters are adjustable and editable, seamlessly tiled, resolution-independent, and support real-world HDRI lighting. Also, filters can automatically generate diffuse, specular, bump, and normal maps, which makes Filter Forge an essential tool for artists creating 3D models and environments, architectural visualization and high-end game content. Filter Forge can work as a Photoshop plugin or a standalone application. The key features of Filter Forge include the Filter Editor and a free online library of user-created filters to which anyone can contribute. The Filter Editor is a visual node-based environment allowing users to build custom filters by connecting components into a network to combine their effects. Components include familiar operations such as blurs, gradients, color adjustments, distortions, and blending, as well as fractal noises, HLS and HSY color models, color-preserving adjustments, and more. For end-users, the filter internals are hidden behind a simple set of filter controls – anyone can immediately benefit from filters without knowing what is inside them. Filter Forge's rendering engine takes full advantage of multi-core processors – for example, a dual-core processor can speed the rendering up to 96%. A high-precision floating-point rendering pipeline allows Filter Forge to support 16- and 32-bit image modes and allows users to save the results into high-precision image formats, such as OpenEXR. Filter Forge's custom memory manager allows it to render large bitmaps – up to 65536x65536 pixels – even on moderate amounts of RAM.