Image Effects, Filters, Masks and Other Image Processing Methods

Five favorite frightening Instagram filters to make your Halloween photo experience more scary and fun.

The Hudson filter puts a little chill in the air with blues hues and slight fading effect. It is perfect for outdoor photos like bare trees, scattered leaves and old buildings. This filter will immediately give your images an icy look by altering the light in the photo. You'll be feeling chills in more ways than one.

Your little one is ready to head out the door for a night of trick-or-treating festivities.

Give your photos a rich, weathered look with Brannan. Darken the deep colors and soften the neutrals with this filter and take your pictures back to the 19th century. This filter will add ominous shadows on any photo, from scenery to haunted houses. Brannan also gives your photos a 'classic look' using its metallis tint that is reminiscent of film photography.

You know the scenario -- you try to take a creative photo by applying a filter and then hate how it turns out. You decide to snap another shot, but the moment is gone, an you are left with an ugly photo of a beautiful scene.  If you used iOS 7 to snap your photo, then you are fortunate as you may be able to remove that offending filter. As originally described by Mac Observer, just follow these few directions below.

If you are on an iPhone 4s, iPhone 5, iPhone 5s or an iPod touch (fifth gen), then you can easily undo the camera filter in a few short steps. Just open the image in the Photos app, and click on the "Edit" button in the bottom-middle of the toolbar. When you are in editing mode as shown above, you'll notice the tri-circle icon for the filters. Tap on the filters icon and then scroll to the left to select "None." Hit "Apply" in the upper-right-hand corner and, voila! The filter will be removed. You can also change the filter to another one as I did in the image below.

Microsoft PowerPoint backgrounds can be problematic. You don't want them to distract, but no background at all can be harsh or boring. (Harsh can be an appropriate look, but never settle for boring.) If your focus is a picture, try using the picture itself as the background and the focus. A sample PowerPoint file is provided to help illustrate ths tip.

In this quick tutorial we'll show you how to turn yourself into a vampire with some simple tricks. What you'll need: Find a photo or use your own. Also, grab some cat eyes and blood brushes. Take a photo of yourself. If it’s easier, get someone to help you, as you want to get the right lighting and composition.

"The Internet is riddled with watchful eyes," begins the description on the homepage of Cryptstagram, and the creators of the site intend to do something about it. Put together by folks at The Barbarian Group, Cryptstagram is an online tool that lets you use uploaded images to send secret, encrypted messages.

The idea behind Cryptstagram came up after the NSA surveillance news broke. Technology director at The Barbarian Group, Aimee Kvasir, and her team wanted to find a creative way to protect people’s privacy, without trying to get any sort of ‘lesson’ across.

“We were more interested in combining the themes of glitch art, government surveillance, and personal cryptography than we were with dictating a message or lesson,” Ben Turner, a developer on the project, tells Wired. “The best we felt we could do was provide a tool for people to play with those themes all in one place, to contribute their own opinions and feelings into a common product: a glitched-out image with hidden messages within.”

What came out the other end is a website that works much like Instagram does. You still have to upload a photo and choose a filter. Where it differs is on the types of filters — Cryptstagram lets you choose from several glitch art options including “NSA,” “White Sound,” “Shifty” or custom filters you can make yourself — and the final step. That step is adding a secret message.

You don’t have to embed a message, but if you do, it too will be secured with a password so that only the recipient will be able to open the file. The final image/message combo can only be decrypted and made normal again by decrypting it on the Cryptstagram website using the password.

We don't normally post a separate news story when a new camera model brings a new technology along with it, but Pentax's new mechanical anti-aliasing filter simulator is so revolutionary that it more than deserves special mention. For the first time, a camera exists that lets you choose whether you want a low-pass filter in your optical chain or not. This is huge.

There's always been an uncomfortable trade-off in digital imaging between image detail and image artifacts; crank up the detail, and moiré patterns and color artifacts will follow right behind. Crank down the artifacts, and your images will appear soft and mushy as well. It's the job of the anti-aliasing filter (also called a low-pass filter or LPF) to manage this trade-off. Coosing just the right strength filter is a fine art, and greatly subject to personal preference.

Recently, there's been a move to do away with low-pass filters entirely, for the sake of the increased image sharpness you can get as a result. We at Imaging Resource believe this is a fundamental mistake, because once you have moiré patterns or color artifacts in an image, it can be difficult or impossible to get rid of them. While clever in-camera software can help reduce the incidence of such problems, it's mathematically impossible to do so in all instances. If you drop the low-pass filter, sooner or later, you're going to have moiré patterns or ugly color artifacts in your pictures.

Lomography's film cameras have a devoted following, but the company's new product is aimed squarely at the digital world. The Experimental Lens Kit is a set of three lenses designed to let you shoot multiple exposures - one of the most distinctive effects of Lomography film photos - on your Micro Four Thirds camera. Other companies such as Fujifilm have released cameras that recreate the effect in software, but the Lomography lenses actually have a built-in mechanical shutters to produce multiple exposures optically.

The pack includes a 24mm standard lens, a 12mm wide-angle lens, and a fisheye lens with a 160-degree viewing angle. All three lenses have an aperature of f/8, a shutter speed of 1/100, and a bulb mode; they also come with colored gels that you can insert into a handy slot for filter effects. you won't be getting the best conventional image quality from these lense, of course, but at $89 for the set it could be a fun way to start a Micro Four Thirds collection after picking up that new Panasonic GM1.

Add awesome texture overlays to your photos fast and easy! Simplicity unlike any other app, quickly add texture to your images, save and share your new creations.

Looking to manipulate a photo and make it come alive? Check out the screen shots - you can literally create cool image effects in two seconds!

Tweak your photos to add textures to your images. Cool Image Effects allows you to start with an image from your library, take a new photo or start with one of our standard backgrounds then tweak it with one of over 40 different image effects and fun image add-ons.



Save and share your new creations on Facebook, Twitter or email. You can also just download your image to your device and save it for later or make it your new background.

Thanks to mobile image editing apps like Instagram, the faux tilt shift fad seems to be at its height. But why should we let iPhones have all the fun? Let’s bust out a tilt shift effect using pure CSS.

In this tutorial, we’ll learn all about the new CSS filters in Webkit and how to implement an image mask in CSS. We’ll then use these techniques for our final tilt shift effect. We’re going to hit on all kinds of crazy stuff so read on and we’ll have some fun.

Over the past few years, CSS has been ever so slowly taking over the areas that we used to turn to Photoshop for: gradients, rounded corners, shadows, etc. Recently, Webkit took a big leap forward in this area with the introduction of CSS image filters.

What if you could alter the saturation, contrast or even blur of an image using pure CSS? The possibilities would be awesome. Prepare yourself, because you can do exactly that with a quick line of code.

HyperDither is an OS X image processing utility that converts color or grayscale images to 1-bit black-and-white using a sophisticated dithering routine. Specifically, HyperDither implements the “Atkinson” dithering matrix.

Years ago, during the development of the first Macintosh, Bill Atkinson (of HyperCard, QuickDraw, MacPaint, and now nature photography fame) discovered a very elegant dithering filter to convert greyscale image data for the 1-bit black-and-white Mac video display. The dithering produced by this routine was much higher in quality than the now-ubiquitous Floyd-Steinberg or “error-diffusion” filter (used by QuickTime, Photoshop).

The dither routine was implemented as an option in Apple’s long-gone HyperScan software (A HyperCard stack with some XCMDs/XFCNs) that would connect an early Mac to a flatbed scanner. HyperScan, and hence the most-excellent Atkinson dithering routine, has been unavailable for many, many years—but not forgotten! I e-mailed Bill Atkinson in January, 2003, and inquired about the details of the algorithm. He was kind enough to respond with a brief write-up of the routine.

 To process an image with HyperDither, just drag and drop or copy and paste the image into HyperDither’s main window. You can then save it to disk or copy it back to the clipboard.