| This chapter is about special effects, such as art and photo filters, warping, and Liquify, Lens Flare, and Lighting Effects filters. Also included are a number of scripts, both free and third-party that let you imitate some of the special films, over-the-lens filters, and processing routines that have been traditional in silver-halide (film) photography. The one thing we won't make the room for here is trying to cover every filter made by every manufacturer or even every single filter in Photoshop. This chapter is about effects for photographers, since they're the focus of this book and because no book has room for everything in or that can plug-in to Photoshop. Destruction Is Inevitable Most, but not all, of the effects in this chapter will destroy the original image, which is why they come so late in the workflow. Besides, you probably want your special effects to affect everything that the image needed up to this point. Before you do pretty much anything in this chapter, there's a hotkey that you should drill into your head: Cmd/Ctrl-Opt/Alt-E. Before using it, convert your Background layer to a regular layer, then select all the layers you've created up to this point and press that key hotkey: Cmd/Ctrl-Opt/Alt-E. All the layers will be copied and then merged to become a new layer at the top of the stack. You can now do any destructive thing you want to that layer. If you know you're going to use several effects and don't want them to react directly with other effects, simply make several copies of the effects layer before you beginor repeat the Cmd/Ctrl-Opt/Alt-E trick when the time comes. After that, even if you forget to undo until even History can no longer save you, all you have to do to return to where you were (before you found something you tried in this chapter didn't make the cut) is turn off or delete the merged and copied layer. Then you can merge and copy an unaltered version with a few keystrokes and try again. |
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