Image Effects, Filters, Masks and Other Image Processing Methods

Most of us deal with images when writing content for the Web. Whether you’re a student, blogger, designer, photographer, or just the average user; you may need to process images one time or another. Even if it is not for work, you may need to upload images on your social network, or mail vacation photos to relatives. Basically, you need to edit and process your images.

Image processing is a time-consuming, repeittive and sometimes much-hated thing to do but it has to be done. In situations like these, batch image processors and editors come in handy. They can process many images at a time, as per the set configuration, helping you save precious time for other more important matters or tasks.

Below are a collection of 16 great batch image processors and image editors. Start processing your pictures and images more easily and efficiently today.

“In the two previous installments of my series on Mextures, we saw how to layer individual components onto your photos, and how to save particular combinations of those layers as Formulas. This time we’ll wrap up by showing you how to use the pre-packaged formulas that come with Mextures, and review how to modify those formulas for your own photos.

All in all, I consider Mextures to be a very powerful app for your grunge needs. (Your grunge needs? Who would have guessed I’d ever write that?) The power of the app is in the flexibility, based in the number of filters, how those filters can be modified, and the multiple layers that can be rearranged and modified individually until you’ve got it right. Getting rid of the forced square crop made this app one that I would not soon get rid of. I hope these tutorials have helped you in your use of Mextures.

Imagenomic announced the release of its Realgrain 2 image effects software plugin. Realgrain 2 is a finishing plugin for Adobe Photoshop Creative Cloud, CS5/CS6, Adobe Photoshop Elements 11, and Apple Aperture. The effect helps users to produce images that simulate the grain patterns, color, and tonal range of silver halide films for a film-like effect from digital images. Realgrain 2 has had several upgrades. First, Realgrain 2 has increased processing speeds of up to four times its predecessor.  Second, a new Preset Manager now allows photographers to create presets with multiple categories and gives users a place to make special. Third, Realgrain 2 comes with a number of pre-defined effect presets and a library of 25 color and 20 black-and-white film presets. Finally, the new History Control also allows an unlimited number of history steps for unlimited adjustments without losing previous steps.

"Realgrain addresses the 'last-mile' of the workflow, a critical and final stage in making the photograph. If you are looking for a superior black-and-white conversion, toning and color effects or long for the darkroom age to achieve the soft, warm graininess of film, then Realgrain 2 is the plugin for you," explains Art Ghazaryan, Co-CEO and COO of Imagenomic.  "Realgrain provides a multitude of finishing effect combinations that enable virtually an endless alphabet for creative expression. And now that it provides the same interface and processor as Imagenomic's Portraiture and Noiseware, photographers have access to an ideal suite of image enhancement software products that can seamlessly work into their image complete workflow process."

From the makers of Diptic, Layover is a photography app that lets you blend the colors and textures of up to five photos to create a single image.

Shake to clear functionality lets you quickly clear settings and photos and start over. Option to clear photos after exporting an image, allowing you to easily start over with a fresh canvas. Button to exit out of temporary zoom. Improved in-app help. Support iPhone 5 and iOS 6. Layover makes blending images together simple and fun. Select up to five photos, pick a blend filter, and use the slider to control how much you would like to blend. Then play around with the order of your images and the different blend effects to achieve your desired look.

Image processing is making leaps and bounds as processors shrink and cloud computing takes off. It’s gotten to the point where depth can be extrapolated from single-shot photos; it takes some fancy algorithms and intense calculations, but programs can simulate/predict shapes, textures, and colors of occluded areas of a photograph. In other words, software makes a very educated guess that the blue sky will continue to be blue behind people, and the backs of heads will be round and have hair that’s of similar color and texture as what’s visible. With relative size and distance approximations, depth can also be determined. The new service 3DEFY does some version of this to generate 3D printable images from ordinary photos.

You may remember BumpyPhoto, which offers a similar service. The differences are that 3DEFY gives users control over the creation of the image and their paying for the conversion. BumpyPhoto sells actual prints. 3DEFY sells 3D files that users can then have printed by whatever service they prefer. The modeler is fairly easy to use: upload a photo, trace the subjects, push/pull to preference, and set some basic print parameters. Images can also be bent and turned. It’s fun to play with.

The Photoshop file format is over 23 years old, yet it remains one of the most opaque file formats out there. PSDs are very widely used, yet Adobe has never produced an easy way for developers to work...

The US Patent and Trademark Office officially published a series of 43 newly granted patents for Apple Inc. today. In this particular report we cover another single patent that relates to an advanced projection system with depth sensors.

Apple has been granted a patent today for their invention relating to image processing systems and, more specifically, to depth sensing in combination with image processing for keystoning.

It appears that Apple has a team focused on all manner of projection systems. One of Apple's engineers by the name of Aaron Leiba that is listed as an inventor on this patent was also behind a mysterious high level projection system project that the patent filing described as being the Next Great Thing.

An issue that is common to many image projection systems is image distortion. An image projection system that is placed at a non-right angle with respect to the projection screen may result in distortion of the projected image on the projection screen. For example, the image for projection may be a square, but the projected image on the projection screen may appear to the viewers as a trapezoid, may appear elongated and so on. Correcting image distortion is referred to as "keystone correction" or "keystoning." Apple's granted patent presents a solution to this problem.

There the times when you simply can’t (or don’t want to) hop on your computer to edit or put special effects on a photo. But that doesn’t mean you’re stuck with a shot you’re not totally in love with. You can give your photos almost that full-on Photoshop treatment with Photoshop Touch, the mobile app for iPhone, iPad, or Android.

Not only does Photoshop Touch offer much of the depth of Adobe’s flagship image editor, it also sports an easily understood interface with all the familiar Photoshop tools, such as layers, adjustments, filters, curves, levels—the works.

Photoshop Touch is designed as a more professional tool than the legions of consumer-level image editors competing for the Twitter and Facebook crowd, such as iPhoto for iOS, Perfectly Clear, or even Adobe’s own Photoshop Express. This app is tailored for discerning photographers who want just the right shot to share with others on the go. But, of course, you can use it to edit for social networks too.

The photo app development team at Pixite LLC, in partnership with award-winning creative technologist Ben Guerrette, is excited to announce the addition of ND Patterns + Shapes pack by photographer and designer Neal Dieker in Tangent 1.2 for the iPhone and iPad. The pack is based on NDPATTERNS, the downloadable pattern overlays by Neal Dieker widely used by photographers and artists to create stunning effects on photos. NDPATTERNS overlays have been downloaded over 100,000 times and used in over 75,000 images on Instagram.

Users now can directly apply NDPATTERNS overlays using the ND Patterns + Shapes pack inside Tangent 1.2, a creative tool that lets anyone easily transform their photos into one-of-a-kind works of art using combinations of patterns, shapes, and blends. ND Patterns + Shapes quickly adds effects that can subtly change or completely alter the look and feel of a photograph, a skill set once reserved for graphic artists.

"As one of the many inspirations behind Tangent, Neal's patterns are a welcome addition that fit nicely into the geometric photo overlay theme," says Tangent's creator and lead developer Ben Guerrette. "ND Patterns + Shapes stands out by taking a more subtle approach to the image enhancement capabilities of Tangent while showcasing the wide range of effects that the app provides."

The eye-catching patterns and shapes included in the pack are some of many included in Tangent.

Layer Styles are nothing new. They’ve been used and abused again and again. Despite their ubiquity, or perhaps because of it, many designers do not yet realize the full potential of this handy menu. Its beauty lies in our ability to create an effect and then copy, modify, export, hide or trash it, without degrading the content of the layer.

If you’re reading this, chances are that you already know how important your social media images can be when building a brand. It's the very first thing people look at when visiting your social networking sites - and we all know how important first impressions are.

AP, a design studio that focuses on graphic and interface design, recently launched its Socail Media Image Marker for just that purpose - Helping the technically impaired make awesome social media images for their social network websites.

The online tool allows visitors to import, resize, and edit profile images in an easy to use interface, and since Social Media Image Maker supports all of the major social networks you shouldn't have a problem finding yours using the tool.

Social Media Image Maker is a completely free online service that supports over a dozen social networking sites, from Facebook and Twitter, to Pinterest, Tumblr, Linkedin, Google+, and Foursquare.

What you’ll learn I will show you how I assemble and process photos creatively to create conceptually captivating imagery that goes beyond the individual “matter-of-fact” shot. The time this will take may vary… a lot. For some pictures I use photos I have been collecting for a couple of years, for others I will gather the necessary images in a single afternoon. Some of the best places to find great material for this kind of project are antiques shops, flea markets, museums, historical sites, and so on.

I create a blank document in Laminar, the same size as my statue image.

I open the statue image through Add a Layer. In the Layers panel, I tap on Mask. This will take me to the mask editor. With the default tool, the brush, I proceed to erase the original background to show the texture layer behind it. I use a soft brush by decreasing hardness value to around 50 in the Properties panel. While erasing, I resize the brush and zoom in and out with pinch gestures for precision. If I make mistakes, I go back to a previous state with History or I switch to the eraser tool to bring back parts of the image I accidentally brushed out. I tap on Apply when I’m done masking. I save what I have so far.

In this case it was not needed, but after masking, you can use Laminar’s Adjust and Edit tools to match color tones and luminosity between background and foreground.