Filter Forge

Filter Forge 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. The key features of Filter Forge include a visual filter editor and a free online library of user-created filters to which anyone can contribute. Filter Forge can work as a Photoshop plugin or a standalone application.

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.

The key feature of Filter Forge is the Filter Editor, a visual node-based environment allowing users to build custom filters without writing a single line of code. Filters are assembled by connecting components into a network to combine their effects. Components include familiar operations such as blurs, gradients, color adjustments, distortions, and blending. 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.

Features

On the surface, Filter Forge is just a Photoshop plugin, a pack of filters that generate textures, create visual effects, enhance photos, process images. However, there are 3 things that make Filter Forge unique:
• You can create your own filters. Filter Forge comes with a visual node-based editor allowing you to create your own filters – textures, effects, distortions, backgrounds, frames, you name it. All filters automatically support 16- and 32-bit modes in Photoshop, real-world HDRI lighting, bump and normal maps, huge resolutions, and most filters can be seamlessly tiled.
• You get free access to 9437 user-created filters. Anyone can contribute their textures and effects to the online filter collection so it grows with every submitted filter. This means the more people use Filter Forge, the better it gets.
• Contributors get Filter Forge for free. You submit filters, they get popular with the users, we send you a free copy of Filter Forge. Sounds simple but don't expect a giveaway, you will have to earn it.

Technology

HDRI Lighting
Instead of the old-style point lights, Filter Forge lighting system uses high dynamic range images that capture real-world lighting conditions. As a result, you get real-world lighting which takes almost no time to set up.

16- and 32-Bit Image Modes
Filter Forge uses a full floating-point rendering pipeline, which allows it to support 16-bit images and the new 32-bit image mode in Photoshop CS2.

Floating-Point File Formats
You can save your work in high-precision image formats such as OpenEXR or PFM. Unlike the traditional image formats such as JPG or BMP, these formats use floating-point numbers to store the pixels, which allows to retain every single bit of precision.

Smart Anti-Aliasing
Anti-aliasing, when done in the usual brute-force way, can be devastating to rendering speed. Filter Forge applies anti-aliasing only to those areas of the image that tend to produce aliasing artifacts, which results in vastly improved rendering times.

Dual-Core CPU Support
Filter Forge rendering engine is built to fully utilize the power of dual-core and quad-core processors. A dual-core processor can speed the rendering up to 96% (83 to 86% is the norm). Once we even saw a speedup of 115% – don't ask, we have no idea how that is possible!

Huge Resolutions
The biggest one we tried was 65536x65536 pixels – and it worked! Granted, it took hours, but anyway! Furthermore, the interface remained responsive – we were able to zoom and pan the preview while rendering that monstrosity.

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 eliminates unwanted artifacts such as color banding. Filter Forge's custom memory manager allows it to render large bitmaps – up to 65536x65536 pixels – even on moderate amounts of RAM.