Get creative with Photo Filters

Mixing Photo Filters with blending effects can result in highly creative colour looks with just a few clicks of a mouse

Photoshop contains a number of features and functions that mimic elements of film shooting and darkroom processing techniques; an example of this is the Photo Filter Adjustment Layer. Many of the options available in Photo Filter mimic corrective filters you would traditionally attach to your lens to shoot under various artificial light sources with daylight-balanced film to avoid colour casts, while others are aimed at applying subtle colour effects to images.

The corrective aspect of Photo Filter is more useful with JPEGs than shots taken in raw format, where the white balance can be easily changed during processing; but by working with Blending Modes and other layer-blending controls, it’s possible to achieve highly creative colour effects much more quickly and easily than when using Curves, for instance.

That’s not to say that one method is better than the other, but using the Photo Filter Adjustment Layer is certainly the faster of the two, albeit less controllable.

1 Advanced Sepia

Click on the Create New Fill Or Adjustment Layer icon at the bottom of the Layers Panel and select Photo Filter. When the dialog box opens, click on the Filter dropdown menu and select Sepia before setting Density to 100%. Set the Blending Mode to Screen, then press Ctrl/Cmd+J to duplicate the layer. Set the Blending Mode of the new layer to Multiply. Shift-click the Photo Filter layer below and press Ctrl/Cmd+G to make a group, then set Opacity to around 50%.

2 Targeted cool-down

Create a Photo Filter Adjustment Layer; when the dialog box opens, set the Filter dropdown menu to Cyan and Density to 100% before closing the dialog. Next, click on the white mask to make it active and go to Image > Apply Image. When the dialog box opens, use the default settings and click OK to target the colour effect to the lighter tones and highlights in the image. Repeat Apply Image once or perhaps twice to taste. This will work with any filter colour.

3 High-contrast warm-up

Create a Photo Filter Adjustment Layer; when the dialog box opens set the Filter dropdown menu to Yellow with Density at 100%. Change the Blending Mode from Normal to Soft Light to increase contrast and reduce the strength of the colour effect. To finish the look, reduce the layer Opacity for a more refined result – the Opacity here was set to 60% to make the effect strong enough to see in the magazine, but an amount in the 30-50% range would be ideal.

4 Retro colour and contrast

Create a Photo Filter Adjustment Layer; when the dialog box opens set the Filter dropdown menu to Blue with Density set to 100%. Change the Blending Mode that’s set to Normal by default to Exclusion: this will make the image look awful, but reducing the layer Opacity to 30% or less will give the overall image a retro colour effect with a loss of contrast. The result resembles expired film or slightly fogged photographic paper.