Photoshop.CS.Bible [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

The Filter Gallery

To access the Filter Gallery, either choose one of the Gallery Effects filters as you would choose any filter or choose Filter Filter Gallery. One of the complaints often lobbed at the Gallery Effects filters in the past was that image previews were limited to tiny squares in the filter dialog boxes. Thankfully, that's all changed in Photoshop CS. One of the first things you'll notice about the Filter Gallery is the gigantic image preview area on the left side of the dialog box. As with the Lens Blur filter dialog box discussed in Chapter 10, you can adjust the zoom level of the preview using the – and + icons or the pop-up menu under the right-pointing arrowhead at the bottom-left corner of the dialog box. To change the size of the preview, drag the size box in the bottom-right corner of the preview area. Also similar to the Lens Blur filter is the progress bar that appears next to the zoom controls during particularly time-consuming renders.

The middle section of the Filter Gallery dialog box is where you access the filters themselves. The filters are organized in an assortment of folders that correspond to their respective submenus in the Filter menu. Twirl down the triangles (or simply click a folder's name) to reveal a variety of sailboat thumbnails, each altered to represent the effect of applying a particular filter. Luckily, the Gallery Effects filters work on more than images of sailboats (a shortcoming corrected back in Photoshop 5). Click any of the thumbnails to apply the effect to your image and bring up its settings on the right side of the dialog box.

After you enable an effect, you can adjust its settings as you would any other filter. From here, you can more or less go nuts — hop recklessly from folder to folder or filter to filter in the middle section or select a filter from the pop-up menu located above the settings. Click the up-pointing arrowhead to the left of the OK button to toggle the visibility of the filter area in the middle section of the dialog box and create more room for your image preview.

The real power of the Filter Gallery, however, is found in the bottom-right corner of the window, where the applied filters are displayed in much the same manner as layers in the Layers palette. The filters also work in a similar fashion, if only because their stacking order plays a large role in determining how the final image looks. By default, you have only one layer of effects in the Filter Gallery, but adding additional layers is as easy as clicking the new layer icon (it's the little page) at the bottom of the dialog box and then selecting a different filter from the thumbnails. Additionally, you can stack the same filter on top of itself, again and again, varying the settings to create some interesting effects. Click the eyeball icons next to the filter layers to toggle the visibility of any of the effects. Reordering the layers of filters in the Filter Gallery is as simple as clicking one and dragging it up or down the stack. To remove any of the filters, simply highlight its layer and click the trash icon.

The only downside to the Filter Gallery is the lack of an option to turn the thing off. As useful as it can often be, sometimes you want to quickly apply one of the Gallery Effects filters and be done with it. Admittedly, it was quite a bit faster to access individual Gallery Effect filters in previous versions of the program. Nevertheless, the Filter Gallery is a positive addition to Photoshop, and we can only hope there will come a day when we have Filter Gallery II for applying and organizing filters that we might actually want to use more than once in a blue moon.