Filter Forge Freepack 2 - Photo Effects

Filter Forge Freepack 2 is a high-end plug in for Adobe Photoshop and compatible hosts. It allows photographers to apply various enhancing effects to their work.

Pros: Filter Forge Freepack 2 is a plug in for Adobe Photoshop and similar processing platforms. What this module provides is a set of filters for creating creative effects on the photographs taken through cameras. Filters create textures, create visual effects, enhance photos and process the images. The application comes with a set of filters that include colorizer, dreamy, grunge, LOMO, old photo, sepia and vibrance. These are simply names for a combination of effects introduced by the filter; for example sepia turns the photograph into a sepia toned one while LOMO is the effect created as if the photo was taken through a specific Soviet camera which had cult status at one time.

What’s interesting is that the application comes with an editor to create your own filter. Besides the normal effects one can include effects of HDRI (high dynamic range imaging) range of light and shadows in the renderings created. Using textures, effects, distortions, backgrounds and frames and any combination thereof is easily possible.

Because filters can be created easily there is a large library of 4000+ filters created/ contributed by users available to the users.

What’s really interesting is that the application can take advantage of multi core processors in rendering the image. The plug-in shows you the effect of the filter by updating the input image in real time. You can see parts of the image getting updated with the filter. Since there’s no limit on the image size, this can take a while. It is claimed that the rendering gets faster by more than 90% if you specify there is a 2 core processor.

Cons: We already have quad core processors on desktops/laptops. I hope the speeding up process is generalized and can take care of more than 2 cores.

Overall: this is a 4 star application.

Filter Forge Freepack 2 is a free high-end plugin for Adobe Photoshop and compatible hosts based on Filter Forge technology. It allows photographers to apply various enhancing effects to their works, such as sepia, aging or rigidity. All effects are adjustable, seamlessly tiled, resolution-independent, and support real-world HDRI lighting. Filter Forge's rendering engine takes full advantage of dual-core processors – in comparison to a single core the rendering speeds up to 96%. All filters included in the freepack are also available from the Filter Forge filter library, so the users of the 'full' Filter Forge can benefit from them as well.