Benefits
of the plugin

Create that intimate soft look of traditional lens soft filters
Filter out noise
Set the filter to any desired strength or effect


The Soft Filter filter plugin works with these image modes (Windows and Mac)...
8 & 16 bit / channel: RGB, Grayscale, Duotone, CMYK, Multichannel, Lab.

Soft Filter
filter controls

This is the Soft Filter plug-ins control panel. Click to enlarge. The controlpanel and preview area can be changed by dragging the sides.

The filter has two main controls:
1. Effect % - the intensity of the softening.
2. Spread - the size of the softening.

In addition you can target the softening to lights, midtones and darks or apply a graduated effect.

Example -

The Soft Filter plugin is an exact digital equivalent of the classic lens soft filters.

The Soft Filter

Effect

Spread

These are the main controls.

Effect % determines how strong the soft filter should be.
Spread determines the size of the soft haze.

The photo to the right was filtered below at various effect levels, but with the spread size 10 in all cases. A spread of 10 would normally be considered too high for such a small image, but for the sake of illustration it is fine.

Notice the spread and fade-out of the haze in the effect 100% example. It matches exactly the fade-out and spread of traditional lens soft-filters.

Like the traditional lens soft filters, you can use this filter to create a romantic and warm mood in the photo or as a noise filter.

Retouch levels

Retouch levels

The three slider Lights, Midtones and Darks are common to most Power Retouche filters and they adjust the level of retouching applied to the respective brightness levels. In other words with our soft filter, you can for example soften the lights more than the shadows.

The following three examples illustrate this.

Effect = 100, Spread = 10, but applied solely to either lights, midtones or darks. In practical use one would combine various amounts of all three levels, but for the sake of illustration...

Graduated effect

These controls are common for many of the Power Retouche plug-ins. Using graduated effect will cause the filter to apply it's filtering at full strength in one side of the image and then fade the effect out towards the other side. You can change direction by right clicking the preview (Windows) or Ctl-clicking (Mac). Midpoint will shift the balance between how large an area will be filtered at full strength and how much will have a faded out effect. Contrast will change the accelleration and spread of the fade-out. Diffusion will make the graduated effect slightly irregular so it looks natural; a setting of 5 is usually best.

In this example we applied a graduated effect towards the bottom, setting midpoint low. This retouch created a depth-of-field by softening the foregound. To create a look more of blur than softness, as in this case, set the effect high and the size low.

Process in tiles

The plug-in has two modes: it can process the entire image in one gulp, or it can process the image in tiles. Processing in tiles is slower, so only use it if your image is larger than the amount of free ram.