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7. The Menus / 7.8 The Effects Menu

### 7.8.7 Effect Filters/Drawing Filter

Drawing Filter is a filter generator.

It is an extreme powerful, but quite complex tool. It works the following way:

At the beginning a new image is created. This image can be filled with the background color or be a copy of the active image layer.

Then the drawing filter walks through the image with a predefined step size. On every position PhotoLine will do an action with a selected tool. This action can, depending on the color of the point at the actual position, vary: the drawing angle, the stroke length, the intensity and the saturation of the painting color can be changed.

Here is the description of the fields in the dialog:

The subdialog Filter offers the basic settings.

The switch Copy Original controls, whether the new image will be a copy of the active image layer or it will be filled with the color of the color field beside the switch. Effectively you are going to decide if PhotoLine should draw on an empty image or over the original.

Brush sets the brush, which is used for the drawing action. The brush is important for two reasons. The first reason is, of course, that the brush is used for drawing. The second is, that in the following several settings are defined relative to the size of the brush (in percent). You can change the brush by right clicking (Windows) or by Ctrl+clicking (Mac OS) the brush field. Another option is double-clicking, which displays the brush editor. Brush Mode allows to roughen the brush. Values larger than 0 delete certain pixels and values smaller than 0 blend them out. This way it is possible to achieve a coal or chalk effect.

Step sets the distance for the actions. The steps are in percent of the brush width. Density controls whether the tool is applied at every step or only with a certain probability.

Tool sets the drawing tool. You have the choice between Painting, Water and Finger. Water and finger are working as usual. Painting - on the other hand - uses always the color at the current position as the painting color.

The subdialog Options is used for fine tuning the drawing filter.

The Intensity used for drawing can be varied in different ways. Beside the mode combo box there are two text fields for the minimum and maximum intensity (in the range of 0 to 255) and a switch. There are four possibilities to set the intensity: the intensity can be Fix, dependent of the Hue, dependent of the Intensity and dependent of the Saturation of the color of the current position. If it is Fix, the maximum value is used. All other settings will result in an intensity between the minimum and the maximum value depending on the mode value. You can also invert the intensity.

Angle sets the direction, in which it is drawn (starting from the current position). You can set, similar to the Intensity, a minimum and a maximum value (in the range of 0 to 360 degrees).

Length controls the length of the brush stroke. It offers the same adjustments like Intensity. Usually the minimum and the maximum value is interpreted as percent. But this can be changed with Absolute. In this case the value is used in pixels.

The last point, Saturation, is only important, if the tool is Painting. If Saturation is set to Saturation, and the minimum value is 0 and the maximum value is 255, the color of the current position is used as drawing color. But this is modifiable. If Fix is selected, and the maximum value us 255, the image will become very colorful.

If Fix Color contains a non-transparent color, it is always used as tool color.