Effects are used to apply an adjustment to your entire composited image. The number of effects has more than doubled in PhotoKey 8 Pro, giving you more options than ever for finishing your images.Your foreground, background, and any layers will all be impacted by Effects. If you wish to alter only the foreground or background of your project, you will want to use Filters instead.
Some effects are useful for making basic adjustments to the color and tones of your image, while others allow you to dramatically alter the appearance by applying complex special processes.
Effects do not affect overlays or text, but they will affect all other layers.
Effects List
Auto Color
An automated filter to quickly adjust the color of your image by balancing the color channels. This can be effective for quickly applying a unified color adjustment to your entire image.
| • | Threshold: Raises the black point of the color adjustment. |
| • | Blend With Original: 0% shows only the adjusted image, while 100% shows only the original image. |
Auto Contrast
An automated filter to quickly adjust the contrast of your image by adjusting contrast to balance the tones. This can be effective for quickly applying a unified color adjustment to your entire image.
| • | Threshold: Raises the black point of the contrast adjustment. |
| • | Blend With Original: 0% shows only the adjusted image, while 100% shows only the original image. |
Auto Levels
An automated filter to quickly adjust the tones of your image by altering the white and black levels of the color channels. This can be useful for quickly applying a unified color adjustment to your entire image, to tie the whole thing together.
| • | Threshold: Raises the black point of the color adjustment. |
| • | Blend With Original: 0% shows only the adjusted colors, while 100% shows only the original image. |
Bleach bypass
This simulates the technique of silver retention in film processing, resulting in a high contrast, low saturation image.
| • | Contrast: sets the amount of contrast in the image. Low values will give similar contrast to the original image, while higher values will give results more typical of traditional bleach bypass. |
| • | Saturation: adjust the saturation of the image. 1.00, at the center, is the original saturation level. An authentic bleach bypass look will want a saturation level between 0.70 and 0.80, but you can adjust it to suit your preference. |
| • | Strength: sets the overall strength of the bleach bypass effect. |
Brightness
Alters the brightness of your finished composite, from completely black to completely white.
Color Balance Pro
Color balance pro gives you manual control over the balance of the individual color channels in the image, while retaining the original saturation levels in the image. This allows you to make adjustments for color casts without altering the original tones of the image.
| • | Red: sliding right increases the values in the red channel of the image. Sliding left decreases red, thus increasing cyan. |
| • | Green: sliding right increases the values in the green channel of the image. Sliding left decreases green, thus increasing magenta. |
| • | Blue: sliding right increases the values in the blue channel of the image. Sliding left decreases blue, thus increasing yellow. |
Contrast
Slide left to reduce the contrast in your image, or slide right to increase the contrast.
Duo Tone
Colorizes the image based on two user-specified colors. white areas of the image are assigned one color, black areas are assigned the other, and the remaining tonal values of the image are assigned colors based on a gradient between the two selected colors.
| • | Color 1: defines the color assigned to the white areas of the image. |
| • | Color 2: defines the color assigned to the black areas of the image. |
| • | Invert: swaps the assignments of colors 1 and 2, so color 2 is used for white and color 1 is used for black. |
| • | Threshold: moves the mid-point of the gradient by setting the brightness at which the color switches from color 1 to color 2. |
| • | Softness: controls the size of the transition between the two colors. Lowering this to 0 will create a hard edge, where everything in the image is either one color or the other. Increasing softness will result in a wider gradient of tones between the two colors. |
| • | Blend with original: a value of 0 gives only the duotone colors, while increasing the value gradually blends the original colors with the duotone, until a value of 100 restores the original colors entirely. |
| • | Brightness used: allows you to select the method used to map the image tones. They can be mapped based on intensity, luminosity, or brightness. |
Focus Blur
Using the same techniques as the Depth of field filter, the Focus blur can be used to apply a blur-based vignette to your composited image. The defaults create a soft, circular vignette in the center of the canvas.
| • | Type: the focus blur can be in a radial or horizontal strip shape. |
| • | Origin: click the origin button to display a crosshairs on the canvas which you can use to pinpoint the area that will remain in focus. You can also enter coordinates directly using the number boxes. |
| • | Angle: when using the horizontal strip shape the angle of the rectangle can be adjusted using this rotation wheel. |
| • | Blur: adjusts the level of blur in the out of focus area. |
| • | Spread: the shift from in focus to out of focus can be abrupt or very gradual. A higher spread percentage will result in a more gradual shift. |
| • | Range: adjusts the size of the in focus area. A larger percentage will retain a large in focus area. |
| • | Transparency: Can be used to adjust the intensity of the focus blur effect. |
Levels
These sliders can be used to adjust the black and white levels of the image. The closer together the White and Black levels are, the higher the contrast.
| • | Black: slide to the right to increase the black levels in your image. |
| • | White: slide to the left to increase the white levels in your image. |
Soft Focus
A romantic, ethereal soft focus effect can be applied to your entire image. By default this effect is turned off. To switch it on, tick the small box at the top right of the soft focus title.
| • | Blend mode: each blend mode produces a slightly different soft focus effect. Experiment with each to see which suits your composition the best. |
| • | Blur: adjusts the spread of the soft focus effect. |
| • | Strength: adjusts the intensity of the soft focus effect. |
Tint
Applies a stylish tint to your image. They are based on traditional methods of developing film. Each type tints your image toward a single unique hue, while the strength slider enables you to blend that tone with your image's original colors.
| • | Type: a wide variety of different tints are available. |
Black & White gives a basic desaturated effect.
Sepia creates a brown image with strong yellows.
Bronze also creates a brown image, but darker and with less yellows than traditional sepia.
Cyanotype tints your entire image toward cyan.
Emerald gives an almost black and white image, but with subtle hints of green.
Gold uses a more subtle brown than sepia, giving a less saturated tint.
Palladium gives a similar color to bronze, but less saturated
Platinum is close to black and white, but with a slight blue shift
Platinum/Palladium combines platinum and palladium to give a color between the two.
Selenuim creates a nearly black and white image, with a slight leaning toward red
Silver gives a rich black and white look, with a tiny amount of blue
| • | Strength: adjusts the intensity of the tint effect by blending the tint color with the original colors of your image. |
Three-strip Process
This simulates an old Technicolor film processing technique to provide particularly rich, defined colors.
The color strength settings can be used to adjust the intensity of the effect in each channel.
Vignette
A customizable vignette can be applied over the top of your images. This can be used for a variety of attractive results.
| • | Color: your vignette can be any color you want. |
| • | Light/Normal/Bold: these three presets enable you to quickly choose from three standard vignette styles. |
| • | Horizontal Stretch: widen or narrow the vignette on the horizontal. |
| • | Vertical Stretch: widen or narrow the vignette on the vertical. |
| • | Feather: changes the edge of the vignette between a hard and soft edge. |
| • | Feather Bias: adjusts the weighting of the feather. At '1.00' the feather is an even spread from transparent to the maximum strength level. At lower values the feather will be pushed towards the outer edge, keeping the center more transparent. At higher values the feather will be drawn towards the middle. |
| • | Strength: adjusts the visibility of the vignette. |
Vignette Exposure