Top 10 GIMP Filters

hello and welcome to yet another tutorial by davies media design my name is michael davies and in today's tutorial i'll be going over my top 10 filters found in these are all built-in filters so none of these require any sort of third-party plug-in downloads or purchases i'll be using version 2.10.18 which is the latest version of at the time of this tutorial before i dive into today's tutorial don't forget to check out my website daviesmediadesign.com i have tons of video tutorials ebooks and help articles covering free software so definitely check that out you can enroll in my 2.10 masterclass from beginner to pro photo editing on udemy you can enroll in any of my skillshare classes by visiting gimpschool.com and you can get more with a premium membership to davey's media design i'll include all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video for this top 10 filters list i've basically chosen filters that perform the best as well as those that have the most utility or usefulness and the filters that are most commonly used or most popular so in other words there are tons of great filters in but if they're sort of more obscure or have very few use cases i went ahead and skipped over those filters for this list these are basically in the order they are found inside of the filters drop down so let's dive into filter number one and that is going to be the gaussian blur filter so this is probably the most commonly used and most popular filter in because it does have a ton of uses it can be used of course to apply a general blur to your layers but it can also be used to blend certain effects so if you have harsh lines from things like painting or your layer masks it can be used to blend those harsh lines it can also be used to create some cool soft glow effects as well as many other uses so diving into here you'll see i have a composition where i've removed the background i have a layer mask on here and i just used the foreground select tool to get rid of this background which i do have an entire tutorial dedicated to but i'll first show off what the gaussian blur filter can do by coming over here and unhiding this stroke layer so here you can see i've drawn a stroke around my subject here and i do have a tutorial on how to draw an outline around subjects in a photo but i'll make sure i'm clicked on this stroke layer so that is my active layer and now i'll go to filters so here is the filters menu blur gaussian blur this is our first filter so here is the gaussian blur filter dialog box and i'll just briefly go over the settings for each one of these filters i cover but the size x and size y filters basically control how much blur you're adding here and by default this chain link icon is going to be locked i recommend you keep that locked and so by increasing the size here for the x and y you'll see that's going to add a blur and in this case the blur is blurring that stroke i drew it around the subject and it's creating this cool glow effect so it's very common to keep these other settings here set to the default so i'm not going to get into those too much but here's a before here is an after and i'll click ok so that's one of the uses let's hide that stroke layer and then we're going to unhide this background layer to demonstrate the second use so this background layer was not the original background obviously let me come over here and click on our original image layer and if i right click i can go up to disable layer mask and you guys can see that was the original background so right click let's uncheck disable layer mask so there is a layer mask on here and if i hold ctrl and zoom in you'll see that the layer mask is not perfect so you can still see some of the original background so for my second example here with the gaussian blur filter i'm going to blend the effect created here by the layer mask so i'm blending the edge of the layer mask so making sure the layer mask is active i'll come back to filters blur gaussian blur and you'll see that just adding that very tiny amount of blur is going to help blend that and of course i could continue turning this up until i got the result i wanted if i went all the way up it'd be a bit too much so if i hold ctrl zoom out you can see what having just a bit of blur does to this it helps to blend this in and it's also kind of creating a glow since the original background was a solid gray color so click ok on that the second filter on my list is the high pass filter and this is one of two very commonly used sharpening filters found in so it's used to sharpen an image what it does essentially is it isolates the edge details of your image by using contrast and then you can use those isolated edges in order to sharpen those details so let me show you by coming over here to this image of a bird and i'll hold ctrl and zoom in with my mouse wheel so what i'll do is i'll duplicate this image and i'm going to add a layer mode to this so i'll go to my mode and scroll down until i get to the soft light layer mode and now what i'll do and let me just double click and name this sharpening hit the enter key so on our sharpening layer i'll go to filters enhance high pass and i'll hold ctrl and zoom in so because we have a layer mode on here it's hard to tell exactly what's happening but if i change the layer mode back to normal temporarily you'll see everything has been grayed out that's not really considered a detail and the edges of details are now showing here and you can adjust how much of those details are selected using the standard deviation so if i increase this it's basically decreasing the threshold of what's considered an edge and so selecting more details whereas if i decrease this you'll see it is being a bit more subjective as to what it considers an edge and then if you increase the contrast amount that is increasing the amount of contrast being applied to those edge details so it makes them more prominent and then if i decrease that amount you'll see that'll make these less prominent so if you want to add more sharpening i recommend increasing the contrast and usually you can increase the contrast more with larger images so let's go back here and change this layer mode back to the soft light layer mode and you can preview this so here's a before here's an after in this case there's not a ton of sharpening happening here you can also come down and change the layer mode to something like hard light instead so once again here's a before here's an after we're getting a bit more sharpening and let's also increase the standard deviation a bit so once we have the settings as we want them i'll click ok and now we've added some sharpening here to our image as i mentioned this is one of two commonly used sharpening tools inside a the second one is going to be the third top filter on my list and that is going to be the unsharp mask filter so this is probably the most commonly used sharpening filter and in my opinion it is the best the reason for that is that it's super easy to use and it's very effective so sticking with this image i'm going to delete the other sharpening layer we just created and in this case our sharpening is going to occur directly on the original layer you can always duplicate this layer if you want to preserve the original image so let's double click on this and name it unsharp mask hit the enter key so now i'll go to filters enhance so there was high pass now we'll go to sharpen unsharp mask so this essentially uses the same principles here it's going to add contrast to the edges of the details in your image it's just going to do that using slightly different metrics so we have the radius which is essentially increasing or decreasing the size of those edge pixel areas or those edge details and then you have the amount so that's of course either increasing or decreasing the amount of sharpening happening on those edge details and usually when you have larger photos you can increase the amount more in this case it's a fairly small photo so when i increase the amount it's adding way too much noise and way too much contrast to those edge details so keep that in mind when you're sharpening with these and then threshold if you increase this amount you'll see that's pretty much removing the effect from those edge details so i tend to keep the threshold set to zero here's a before here's an after i'll click ok if i hold ctrl use my mouse wheel to zoom out you'll see there's the final photo and we can compare to the original so there's the new photo much sharper there and that is a filter i use pretty much every time i edit a photo in so number four on my list is going to be the news print filter this filter is not as commonly used but it does create some really cool effects and it is a great filter so i'll come over back to our original composition to demonstrate this so as the name suggests this filter is going to give you that newsprint look or in other words the half toning look which is the more technical term for this so it allows you to create either lines dots squares diamonds etc instead of using the normal color patterns here the normal pixel patterns that make up the colors in your image so let's come over here and make sure that this main layer is our active layer and now i'll go to filters distorts newsprint and this is a fairly new filter by the way so if you don't see it make sure you upgrade to the latest version of but up top here you can change the color model so by default it'll be black and white just like a newspaper but you can do rgb or cmyk if you prefer so cmyk of course is cyan magenta yellow black rgb is red green blue and you could flip the black and white to white on black if you prefer i'm going to stick with black and white and then you could change the type of pattern here so we're using a line right now we can go with a circle if we want so i really like the look of the circle and you've got some other options here as well you can increase the size of the circles using this period slider or you could decrease it of course if you want more detail and you could change the angle so right now these are angled slightly up into the right so at a 75 degree angle you could see this is going up and to the right you could change this using either this little wheel here or you could just use the slider the wheel helps you visualize what direction those dots are going to be going in i'll keep this set to the default or close to it you can increase or decrease the quality of the dots here using the anti-alias slider i'll keep this set around the default and then below this you have the effects section and this is basically adding a bunch of turbulence to these dots so you can see there's a turbulent slider block size and angle boost it essentially disrupts how these dots look i don't really like what these effects do but you can see here here's an example just turning the turbulence up or the angle boost so again i'm not a big fan of those but here you can see what that half toning does to our image and i'll click ok to apply those changes and there is the result of that effect moving on the number five filter on my list is the drop shadow filter and this filter can be added to text which is where it's most commonly used or it can be added really to any objects in your composition and what it does is exactly what it sounds like it's going to drop a shadow below the object or the text and it makes it appear as if the text is floating above a surface or it just helps the text or object stand out against the backdrop of your composition so let me start by first showing you guys how to use this filter with text so i'll go to file new and i'll change this to 1000 by 1000 and i'll click ok so let me come over here reset my foreground and background colors to black and white hit the x key to switch to white shift b to grab my bucket fill tool we'll fill that in with white we'll hit the t key on the keyboard to grab the text tool let's increase the size of the text to 200. i'm just using sentry gothic bold for this example and i'll click on my composition and i'll type so right now our text is the same color as our background so we can't see it but what i can do is go to filters light and shadow drop shadow and there you can see now we have a shadow behind our text that's helping our text stand out so using the drop shadow dialog we can change the offset of the actual shadow so right here we have an x and y slider x will move it on the horizontal plane y on the vertical plane and once again this will be linked by default i recommend keeping that linked unless you want different values for your x and y so you can see what happens when i shift this to the left it's going to move this in a diagonal fashion when you move the x and y sliders together otherwise if we unlink this we could just move this horizontally and if we use the y slider we can just move this around vertically the blur radius is just how blurry that drop shadow is going to be and a new feature is that right now when for example we increase the blur radius the blur goes outside the original layer size the original layer boundary for our text if we were to apply this as is the boundary would actually automatically move outwards so that is a new feature instead of cropping out the blur and having it get cut off it would extend the layer boundary here to fit in that blur i'm going to turn the blur down i don't want it up that much we can also change the color of the blur so right now it's just black we can go with the red color or any of the colors in here let's go with the bluish color for now and you could change how prevalent that drop shadow is by increasing the opacity or decreasing it so let's go with about right there by setting the clipping to adjust as i mentioned that's going to move the layer boundary outwards to fit the new drop shadow if you do want it to get cut off you could change this to clip so i'll click ok and there's our drop shadow this filter can be used with objects as well so not just text let me demonstrate by coming back over here to this composition i'll come over here right click go to apply layer mask so that now we just have this layer here with a transparent background so the main object in this layer is going to be our subject and now i'll go to filters light and shadow drop shadow and there you can see it'll add a drop shadow behind our subject we can mess around with the position of this and all the other settings which i'm not going to do again and i'll click ok and now our object has a drop shadow the number 6 filter on my top 10 filters list is also a shadow this one is going to be the long shadow this is another new feature that was added in one of the newer versions of this filter does exactly what its name says it adds a long shadow to an object or a piece of text so let me come back over here to our composition with the text and i'll come over here and delete this text layer let's switch our color to black hit the t key on the keyboard and this time we'll retype and now i'll go to filters light and shadow long shadow so here you can see what this is doing let's change the color so we can see it better let's go with a green color this time click ok so right now this is set to finite we could change this to infinite that's going to have this go all the way to the edge of the layer in this case i didn't reset the size of the layer so we can go to layer layer to image size and now making sure we're on our layer let's bring back up that long shadow filter so filters light and shadow long shadow change the color back to that greenish color we were using so here under style we have this set to finite right now let's go back to infinite so that makes the shadow go all the way off the page it gives it that flat look that you see a lot the flat look isn't quite as popular as it was a couple years ago but it's still pretty popular it's used for things like flat icons etc so you can achieve that look very easily here with this filter you can also change this to fading so it's going to fade out the shadow or fading with a fixed length and you can adjust the length here of course you can also adjust the angles so by moving this slider around you'll see that the shadow is going to move around the text and the midpoint is going to be the point at which this starts fading out so by increasing the midpoint you are prolonging the point at which the fade out begins so it's going to be further away from the text if you decrease the midpoint it'll start fading out closer to the text the composition just determines what the final layer is going to show so in this case we have the shadow plus the original image which in this case is our text if this was on a duplicate layer we could change this to the shadow only so that'll get rid of our text or we could do the shadow minus image which is going to erase the text entirely so that will only have the shadow remaining here in this case we're not working on a duplicate layer so i'll change this back to shadow plus image and i do want to mention one more thing about the finite style option here so this is going to make our text look 3d so this is a very quick way to make some 3d text inside a and that's why i really like this filter so i'll click ok to apply that the number seven filter on my list is the vignette filter so for those of you who watch my photo editing tutorials you'll know i use this in pretty much every single photo edit that i do a vignette is basically going to be a frame around your image and it helps to draw the viewer's eye into whatever the subject is in your photo and in my opinion it also helps make your photos look more professional and the vignette can either be added directly onto the photo layer or you can create a new layer which is what i like to do so i'll come over here and click to create a new layer and i'll rename this vignette fill it with transparency and click ok on my vignette layer i'll go to filters light and shadow and vignette for those of you keeping score that is three different filters in light and shadow so obviously that's my favorite filter section but now i can adjust these settings here and i'm not going to get too much into each one of these settings because i do have an entire tutorial dedicated to the vignette filter but the most common settings are going to be the radius so i can increase that to bring the vignette out the softness is going to determine how far into the center this vignette goes basically same with the gamma so the gamma is sort of how quickly the vignette is going to fall off and i'll preview this here's a before here's an after i like keeping my vignettes nice and faint i don't want them to be really noticeable and i'll come over here and click ok so the eighth filter on my top 10 filters list is going to be the add border filter so this does exactly what it sounds like it's going to add a color border quickly around your image i do have an entire tutorial dedicated to the various methods for creating a border for an image but in this case let me come back over here to my main image layer all i have to do is go to filters decor and then add border so this one is not a giggle filter all the other filters we've been working with so far are giggle filters you could tell because they have the little g on the left a giggle filter basically just means that you get a live preview on your image while you're working with it so with the border filter we're not going to get a live preview which is a downside but that's all right so we'll come back over here to decor and go to add border so here you can change your border size which is going to be in pixels so i'll just go with 50 and you can change your border color so right now this is set to white you could change this to anything you want i'll keep this set to white and the delta value on color is going to determine whether or not the shading is going to be different on the various sides of the border so if you have this value set to a higher value it'll basically make your border look like it's more 3d so for this example i'll go with 100 and there's a formula used for how this delta value calculates for each side it's basically calculated differently which is why you get different types of shading and therefore that 3d look but i'll come over here and click ok so now you'll see we have a border added here it's 50 pixels wide on each side and because we set that delta value to a higher value you also have different shading on these two sides which is making the border look more 3d the number nine filter on my list is a more advanced filter and that is going to be the bump map filter so i usually use this filter whenever i'm placing a graphic on some sort of texture so for example a t-shirt design or something like a wall what the bump map filter does is it takes the differences in luminosity from a certain layer and it basically assigns those variations in luminosity to different heights so it makes it appear as if there are subtle bumps in your image and that can help with the realism especially as i mentioned when you're adding a graphic to a textured surface so here's our layer the first thing i want to do is make the layer the same size as my image otherwise the bump map will be off so go to layer layer to image size so now let's assign the bump map to this and basically what it's going to do is grab the texture from the brick wall behind it and apply it to our logo layer so let's go to filters map bump map and this is a giggle filter so it will give us a live preview on here for the aux input you want to add the layer that you're going to be grabbing the texture from so in this case our brick layer so we'll click on this it will give us all of our open compositions right now in we want to navigate to the composition that contains our texture so it's going to be this one right here so it gives you all the layers as well as all the channels from that composition you have selected so i'll just go with this brix layer double click on it and now you can see it's grabbing the differences in luminosity from that brick photo and it's adding that as textures to our visible copy layer or our logo layer and now you can play around with the settings so compensate is basically going to brighten this because this effect does tend to darken the original layer so if i check that again it's going to brighten that back up you can invert it if you think that the textures are placed backwards on here so in other words if you think that it's taking the raised textures and making them look like they're lowered so in this case i will keep this inverted if you want this to be tileable you can check the tiled option i'm going to skip over that for now azimuth is basically going to change the direction of the light so if you think the lighting direction is off you can adjust that using the slider here the elevation slider essentially changes how prominent the bumps in your texture are going to be on that logo so if i decrease the elevation here you'll see the texture is going to come out more and if i increase the elevation the texture is going to be more subtle i'm going to add a decent amount of texture to this and then the depth is going to bring out some of the nuances in the texture so it's going to make some of these smaller details in the texture more prominent so by increasing the depth you can see how much texture is added there and if we decrease the depth it'll bring that down so we'll increase the depth a little bit there you can offset the bump map so right now it's totally centered on our layer i don't want to offset it the water level has to do with any transparent areas you might have in your composition in this case we don't have any transparent areas and it's not super common but essentially what this filter does is it treats transparent areas as holes and this kind of changes whether or not that hole is going to be filled in or not probably not totally correct but that's my understanding of it finally ambient lighting factor is going to add or remove lighting to this so you can see it's going to brighten this up or it's going to tone it down so this kind of has to do with the compensate checkbox up top that we went over earlier and it's also going to decrease the amount of textures really the amount of effect created by the textures this sort of flattens those textures out so let's come down here and we'll uncheck the preview option so that's before we added the bump map here's after so this gives us some nice realistic textures here and i'll click ok the final filter on my top 10 filters list is going to be the little planet filter so this is another fairly new filter and it's going to be used to create a sort of little mini globe effect so let me show you what i mean i'll come over here it works best with skyline photos such as this one and i'll go to filters map little planet so here you can see what it does is going to just take the photo and essentially wrap it around itself and it creates this look where it looks like a little globe or like a little mini earth or something and if i come over here i can adjust the zoom so i can zoom in a bit more i can change the pan which usually painting a camera means moving it left or right but you'll see this will just spin this differently around the sphere we've got the tilt option here so right now it's set to 90 degrees which is going to give us that completely spherical look whereas if i shift this it's going to tilt our camera up or down which is more true in this case to a traditional camera movement here and you can see that's changing the plane of the sphere so let's set this back to 90. if i middle click with my mouse and i type in 90. the spin is basically going to rotate this so right now you can see the seam is right here towards the bottom if i move the spin slider to the right it's just basically rotating this and if i move it the other direction is going to rotate the image in the other direction so that's what that does and we've already gone over the zooms just going to zoom this in or out and i'll click ok those are my top 10 filters built directly into if i left out your favorite filter let me know in the comments but that's it for this tutorial thanks for watching if you liked it you can check out my youtube channel at youtube.com daviesmediadesign don't forget to subscribe and click the bell icon to be notified each time i have a brand new tutorial you can also check out any of the links to my resources in the description of the video but thanks for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: Davies Media Design

Views: 53,561

Keywords: gimp, gimp tutorial, gimp for beginners, how to gimp, GIMP 2.10, GIMP, basics, GIMP 2020, filters, GIMP filters, image filters, text filters, drop shadow, long shadow, vignette, little planet, high pass, unsharp mask, sharpen, newsprint, bump map, GIMP 2.10.18, best filters

Id: Pbb2q65AxL0

Length: 26min 23sec (1583 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 10 2020