Key Features of Filter Forge
Seamless Textures
Most filters in Filter Forge automatically support seamless tiling — the ability of the image to be repeated without visible seams. It works on textures and effects, on square and non-square images, and on all additional texture maps generated by the filter — such as albedo, roughness, or normal maps.
Photo Effects
Our free Filter Library offers thousands of photo effects — cartoon and watercolor effects, frames, distortions, glitches, sketches, and more. Apply an effect to any image, tweak its settings, browse through thousands of randomized variations — all quick and easy!
Thousands of User-Created Filters
With Filter Forge, you get free access to our ever-growing online Filter Library with thousands of photo effects and seamless textures — all procedural, resolution-independent, and fully adjustable. All filters in the Library are free to download and use in any Filter Forge edition.
Visual Node-Based Filter Editor
Create your own filters or tailor existing ones to your needs in a visual node-based editor. No coding required — filters are built visually by connecting components representing familiar image operations such as Blur, Levels, Invert, Gradient, or Perlin Noise.
Photoshop Plugin
Filter Forge works as a standalone application for Windows and Mac, or as a plugin for Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements, Paint Shop Pro, Affinity Photo, and other applications — see the full list of supported plugin host applications on the Download page.
New in Filter Forge 14.0
Animated 3D Noise Components
Filter Forge 14.0 updates six familiar components from the Noise category: Perlin Noise, Blocks, Cells, Chaffs, Pyramids, and Techno. All these noise components can now be animated along the Z-axis to give authors more room for creativity. Read more.
Threshold HDR
Filter Forge 14.0 updates the Threshold component from the Adjustments category: it now supports HDR sources and HDR cutoff levels. Read more.
Improved Eyedropper Tool
The eyedropper tool has been overhauled in version 14: it now allows filter authors to sample the original image as well as the rendered one, and the color value is automatically copied to the clipboard. Read more.
More Preview Sizes
Three new preview sizes are now available on the Preview Size menu. Read more.
Text Component
Filter Forge can now render text! The Text component introduced in version 14.0 allows filter authors to convert a text string into a bitmap image. Read more.
New in Filter Forge 13.0
Visual Batch Renderer
Filter Forge has had an ability to render multiple images in one batch since version 1.0 but the command-line interface wasn't very intuitive. The new Visual Batch Renderer offers a visual way to construct a rendering batch job, specifying the needed source images, filter presets, and output paths for every rendering task. Also, Visual Batch Renderer lets you apply an effect to all source images in a folder. Read more.
Hyperbolic Components
Filter Forge 13.0 adds 6 new components that allow filter authors to use hyperbolic functions. It simplifies filter creation and gives authors more room for creativity. Read more.
New Way to Process Videos
We continue to make filter editing simpler and faster. In the previous Filter Forge version you could only process a video as an artboard source in the project view. Filter Forge 13 simplifies the process and lets you load video files and image sequences right in the main window. Read more.
Support for WEBP and AVIF Formats
Filter Forge 13 extends support for modern image and video formats. You can now open and save WEBP and AVIF images. Read more.
Duplicating Connections
We continue to make filter editing simpler and faster. Following up on component duplication added in the previous version, in Filter Forge 13 you can also quickly duplicate an existing connection without the need to create it from scratch. Read more.
Separators on the Settings Pane
Complex filters often have lots of diverse controls in a long single list that is difficult to navigate. Filter Forge 13 introduces settings separators that can visually divide controls into meaningful groups. Read more.
Render History
Sometimes you make a beautiful image using a Filter Forge effect but you don't remember what specific filter you used. Filter Forge 13 introduces Render History to help with this inconvenience. Read more.
New in Filter Forge 12.0
Video Processing
Video production professionals and hobbyists have long waited for the ability to process video files with Filter Forge effects. In previous Filter Forge versions you could only process every frame one by one, and you had to disassemble a video clip to an image sequence in advance using a third-party app. It was a non-intuitive and tedious task. No more pain and suffering: Filter Forge 12 lets you apply an effect to a video file in most popular formats. Read more.
Snippets
Mastery is an art of reusing previous experience. Experienced filter designers often find themselves repeatedly recreating certain setups of components from filter to filter. Filter Forge 12 introduces a brand new way to store parts of the filter tree as separate snippets that can be easily reused, managed, and shared. Read more.
Resizable Filter List
Filter Forge 12 is better optimized for wide displays. You can now display the filter list in several columns by moving the vertical separator in the Main window. Read more.
Duplicating Сomponents
Filter Forge 12.0 makes filter editing simpler and faster — you can quickly duplicate a component with all its current settings and incoming connections. Read more.
New in Filter Forge 11.0
Procedural Animation
Filter Forge 11 adds a groundbreaking feature — procedural animation that allows you to create animated image sequences. Unlike keyframe animation commonly found in graphics editors, this is a unique method where filter components define specific image-altering operations to be performed for specific animation frames. Read more.
Image Sequence Processing
Applying a filter to multiple images is a frequent task in video production and photo editing. In previous Filter Forge versions you either had to do this manually, image by image; or use a non-intuitive command-line renderer. No more pain and suffering: Filter Forge 11 lets you process numbered sequences of same-size images in an intuitive way. This comes incredibly handy in video production where videos are often stored as image sequences. Read more.
New Preview Images
For years Filter Forge has offered only a few built-in images used to preview effect filters. In version 11 we're adding dozens of new professional high-quality photos that will help showcase your effects in the best possible way. Read more.
New Way to Add Filter Components
With Filter Forge 11.0 you can assemble filters faster by adding filter components onto the canvas without searching for them in the Component Bar. Read more.
New in Filter Forge 10.0
Projects and Project Files
Meet Project — a new document type that contains one or more filters, source images and artboards. If you regularly need to re-create your previous Filter Forge work or constantly move your work files between computers, you'll love the ability to store everything in a single self-contained package. Learn more.
Draft Mode Speeds Up Filter Previews Up to 10x
Browsing through a vast list of filters, fine-tweaking their settings and comparing the results has never been a quick task. Selecting a different filter makes Filter Forge render the default preset which is usually optimized for quality, not speed. Well, no more: Draft Mode in Filter Forge 10 supercharges filter browsing and preview. Learn more.
Bitmap Cache Component
Filter Forge architecture is procedural and sample-based, and we recommend that filter authors avoid bitmap-based components as much as possible. Still there are cases when you need a bitmap buffer in the component subtree. A traditional way to create such buffers is using a Blur with a tiny radius, which is size-dependent and not very user-friendly. Filter Forge 10 introduces a dedicated component for that — Bitmap Cache. Learn more.
Configurable Input Caches
Though image generation in Filter Forge is mostly procedural and sample-based, certain operations have to rasterize a bitmap before processing it. These operations include Blur, High Pass, Sharpen and others and are known internally as bitmap-based components. Such components have several disadvantages: they consume large amounts of memory and can slow down rendering significantly. To mitigate these drawbacks Filter Forge 10 introduces user-configurable settings for every input that renders an internal bitmap of its source. Learn more.
Added in Filter Forge 9.0
Physically-Based Rendering for major 3D engines
Filter Forge 9 adds physically accurate texture maps that are fully compatible with Unity3D, Unreal and other 3D rendering engines. In contrast with old Surface filters that were not fully physically accurate, you can save new maps from Filter Forge and import them into your favorite engine right away without adjustments. You can also easily convert old filters to the new PBR Surface type. Learn more.
Other Improvements
Filter Forge 9.0 introduces several other improvements, which include support for filter stacking in the plugin mode, a new Note component, and the ability to rename filters without entering the Filter Editor. Learn more.
Adding Notes to Presets
With Filter Forge 9.0 you can add notes to filter presets. Use them to add preset names, explain usage cases and to distinguish between similar-looking presets. Learn more.
Added in Filter Forge 8.0
Tabs
Filter Forge 8 adds tabs to the main window, similar to web browsers. You can load a separate filter and source image in each tab and render them simultaneously. Learn more.
Image Metadata Preservation
Thanks to the rewritten image saving procedures, Filter Forge 8.0 will preserve all image metadata when applying an effect to your image: GPS tags, camera model, DPI, and other info. Learn more.
Backup and Restore Your Filters and Settings
Filter Forge 8 adds a built-in tool to back up installed filters, presets, favorites and other settings to a single file, to be restored later onto another computer or operating system, or a newer Filter Forge version. Learn more.
Added in Filter Forge 7.0
New Sample Cache Architecture Speeds Up Rendering
Rendering speed has always been a concern for many Filter Forge users. Filter Forge 7.0 brings in improvements to sample caching that can speed up lots of filters. Learn more.
Instant Component Search
New instant component search makes adding components to your filter faster and easier. Learn more.
Mappable Lists and Sliders
Filter Forge 7.0 refreshes 47 existing components, making their list and slider inputs mappable. It simplifies filter creation and gives authors more room for creativity. Learn more.
Copy / Paste
Filter Forge 7.0 adds support for copying and pasting images that allows you to use Filter Forge together with any image editor regardless of its support for plugins. Learn more.
New Approach to Channels
Thanks to the recent renderer rewrite, Filter Forge 7 brings in the ability to generate all render channels simultaneously and in parallel with the final image. You can now preview the channels being rendered and quickly switch between them without restarting rendering. Learn more.
Easy Export
The new Export dialog implements the long-awaited option to export multiple render channels at once. You can select specific images for export and fine-tune their export settings. Learn more.
Added in Filter Forge 6.0
Full 64-bit support
For years, the legacy API prevented Filter Forge from utilizing all available memory, hampering rendering speed and stability. Forge 6.0 introduces full 64-bit support for performance and stability improvements. Learn more.
Mappable checkbox inputs
Filter Forge 6.0 updates 33 existing components by making their checkbox inputs mappable, enabling greater flexibility in filter creation. Learn more.
Support for drag-and-drop on the Presets tab
Every filter author must have stumbled into this: you create a filter and want to carefully select presets to showcase its usage, but arranging filter presets is pain. With Filter Forge 6 the pain is gone: you can now drag and drop presets to reorder them. Learn more.
Added in Filter Forge 5.0
Speed Improvements
Filter Forge 5 is often faster than ever before: thanks to cache optimizations, rendering speed of many filters has improved. Learn more.
Randomization Enhancements
Filter Forge 5.0 introduces much-requested enhancements to its randomization functions, including the ability to protect filter settings from randomization, the ability to quickly randomize specific parameters, and a simplified randomization settings menu. Learn more.
Bomber Plus
Bomber Plus is a definite improvement to one of the most popular Filter Forge components. With 10 slave components it allows you to customize each particle individually and create an unlimited number of particle types. Learn more.
Patterns Plus
Bricks, Tiles and Pavements, Filter Forge's "brick-and-mortar" components, have not changed since version 1.0. Filter Forge 5.0 finally refreshes them by adding slave components and making them support HDR colors. Learn more.
Map Switch
Filter Forge 5.0 adds a new component that allows you to switch subtrees based on a mappable Selector input. It is particularly useful in conjunction with the new Bomber Plus. Learn more.
Pixel Awareness
Filter Forge 5.0 introduces new components that output coordinates of a pixel that is currently being rendered and the dimensions of the image that is currently being rendered. This allows you to create effects and textures that depend on pixel coordinates. Learn more.
The Modulo component
A new Modulo component calculates the channelwise remainder after channelwise division of source RGB values by another set of RGB values. Learn more.
Default Component Values
The right-click menu of most components now offers commands to save default values for a particular component, and reset them back to factory settings. Learn more.
Added in Filter Forge 4.0
Filter Manager
The new built-in filter manager helps you organize your filter collection. You can now create an unlimited number of custom folders for user-made filters and favorites. The filter manager also features new filter history and a rehauled filter search list. Learn more.
Loops and Recursions
The Loop component brings two key concepts of programming — nested loops and recursions — into the visual environment of Filter Forge, in a way that doesn't require you to write any code. It lets you render a subtree of components multiple times and combine results of all these iterations into a single output image. Learn more.
Component Grouping
The grouping feature and the new Group component simplify creation of complex filters by letting filter authors "package" reusable parts of the filter tree into custom-made components with user-definable inputs and parameters. Learn more.
Added in Filter Forge 3.0
Support for Multiple Source Images
In Filter Forge 1.0 and 2.0, one could only use a single source image or a Photoshop layer at a time. Starting with version 3.0, Filter Forge allows you to use multiple source images simultaneously. This is implemented by allowing you to load images into Color Controls and the newly introduced Grayscale Controls via the filter interface. Learn more.
Progressive Previews
The idea behind progressive previews is to give you a rough, low-resolution preview of the rendered image as fast as possible, then gradually refine it in subsequent rendering passes until the image reaches the final level of quality. By default, the first rendering pass of the progressive preview is up to 16 times faster than the original preview method! Learn more.
More Preview Images
If you are a longtime Filter Forge user, you're probably sick and tired of the default lifesaver image that Filter Forge uses to preview rendered results — and so are we! Filter Forge 3.0 comes with 6 new preview images so you can choose the one that you like best. Each of these images comes with an alpha channel allowing you to preview your filters on images with transparent areas. Learn more.
Flexible UI with Resizable Panels
The most prominent innovation in the final beta stage is the flexible user interface with draggable separators. Owners of widescreen monitors will benefit from this most. Learn more.
Interactive Before/After Wipe
Filter Forge 3.0 improves interactivity when applying effect filters. We've implemented an interactive slider allowing users to see the original image and the applied effect at a time. Learn more.
Bézier Curves
Bézier curves are commonly used for creating tone curves, bevel profiles and other shapes. With Filter Forge 3.0, you can draw Bézier curves within the new Bézier Curve component that features a powerful curve editor. Learn more.
Edge Detector Component
The new Edge Detector component performs edge detection, similar to certain existing filters in the filter library but faster and in a single shot. The component is highly adjustable and can output HDR colors. Learn more.
Script API for Noise and Blending Modes
Filter Forge 3.0 offers expanded scripting API that adds support for Perlin and uniform noise functions and allows access to the blending modes in scripts. Learn more.
Other Improvements
Filter Forge 3.0 includes several other improvements, which include hexadecimal color values in the Color Picker, HDR and alpha channel support for filter controls, high-precision Color Inspector, the ability to load recently-used images, a unified Bomber component and more. Learn more.
Added in Filter Forge 2.0
Ambient Occlusion
Filter Forge 2.0 takes you beyond the photorealism barrier with its fast and easy-to-use Ambient Occlusion. This shadowing technique calculates how much environmental light can reach a certain point of a surface, and darkens that point accordingly. It's mathematically accurate, it's seamless, and it dramatically enhances the level of realism. Learn more.
Point/Area Lights
Filter Forge 2.0 lets you create any number of point or area lights that allow you to specify how exactly you want your texture to be lit. You can set up almost any lighting you want — create multiple light sources, make shadows darker by setting negative lights, use 360-degree rotation, and much more. Learn more.
New Lighting Options
We have completely redesigned the Lighting tab to provide an easier access to the new lightning options. The new interface allows you to adjust all the lighting elements — HDRI environment, surface height, point/area lights, ambient lighting, and ambient occlusion — using a simple unified interface. Learn more.
Full HDR Support
Filter Forge 2.0 supports high dynamic range (HDR) colors across its entire rendering pipeline, from input images through components to rendered results. Over 60% of Filter Forge components now support HDR colors with unlimited channel values, both positive and negative. You are free to use colors as bright as you want — the Sun's the limit! Learn more.
Color Inspector
Color Inspector is a tool that shows the exact RGB output values of any map component, right in the Filter Editor. It fully supports unlimited HDR colors and can show any value — huge or small, positive or negative. This tool is essential for debugging and fine-tuning complex filters. Learn more.
Bomber Component
The new Bomber is an incredibly versatile, very fast component that lets you spray multiple image particles in a controlled manner — it lets you specify over 30 particle placement, coloration and randomization parameters, most of which can be mapped with images — which gives you tons of creative power! The Bomber component has an HDR-enabled counterpart which can accept and output HDR colors but has fewer blending modes. Learn more.
Transform Components
Filter Forge 2.0 includes four new transform components (Scale, Rotate, Flip and Lookup), as well as an updated version of the Offset component. Most inputs of these new components, including point coordinates, can be specified by very large values and can be mapped with components that output HDR colors. Imagine the possibilities! Learn more.
Polygon and Ellipse Components
Filter Forge 2.0 now includes a Polygon component which lets you generate symmetrical N-gons and stars with adjustable round corners, and an Ellipse component that generates circles and ellipses. These seemingly simple components have a lot of mappable inputs, so their titular shapes can be easily morphed into a variety of other things, often quite unexpected. Learn more.
Free Gradients and Shapes
Filter Forge 2.0 now includes a versatile Free Gradient component with three gradient modes (Linear, Radial and Angular) and arbitrary endpoint coordinates that can be mapped with HDR values. Besides, non-seamless versions of the Ellipse and Polygon components and a brand-new Free Rectangle component are not constrained by the image boundaries. Learn more.
Lua Scripting
Filter Forge 2.0 introduces probably the most significant improvement in its history — scripting! Basically, scripting allows you to implement your own components with custom inputs and internal logic. Scripts in Filter Forge 2.0 are written in Lua, a blazing-fast scripting language held by numerous developers as a number one choice for embedded scripting. Learn more.
RGB Math Components
Filter Forge 2.0 includes 24 new RGB Math components that operate on RGB color channels include arithmetic, trigonometry, power, roots and logarithms, rounding, conditional operations, linear interpolation and directional derivatives. Due to the newly-added support for unlimited HDR colors, these new components can operate on unlimited numeric values from tiny fractions to trillions, positive or negative. Learn more.
Instant Filter Search
To make life easier for people with large filter collections, Filter Forge 2.0 introduces an instant filter search that lets you quickly find filters as you type, searching filter names, descriptions, authors and keywords, and displaying the results immediately. No more fuss with the categories — just type what you want and get it in less than a second! Learn more.
Median, Minimum, Maximum and Percentile Components
With these new components, you can now perform minimum, median, maximum and custom-percentile filtering. The Median and Percentile components are especially handy for creating a wide variety of artistic effects, thanks to their ability to simplify the source image by removing small details while preserving the edges. Learn more.
Non-Seamless Filters
Since the beginning, Filter Forge was all about seamless textures. But times are changing — Filter Forge 2.0 is no longer confined to seamlessly-tiled filters. Unrestricted, non-tiled textures and effects are now first-class citizens of Filter Forge. Support for non-seamless filters enables long-requested features: unrestricted transforms (Scale, Rotate, Offset, Flip and Lookup) and non-tiled Free Gradient, Ellipse, Polygon and Rectangle components. Learn more.
Added in Filter Forge 1.0
Filter Editor
The most important feature of Filter Forge — a visual node-based editor which lets you create your own visual effects and procedural textures. Learn more.
Online Filter Library
Filter Library is a free online repository of filters submitted by Filter Forge users. You can access the Library directly from the user interface of Filter Forge. Users who contribute good filters can earn rewards, including a free copy of Filter Forge.
Seamless textures
Most filters in Filter Forge support seamless tiling, even for non-square textures. A simple one-click operation, Seamless Tiling works no matter whether you have downloaded the filter or created it yourself in Filter Editor. Learn more.
Bump and Normal Maps
Filter Forge can generate diffuse, bump, specular and normal maps for its filters — most seamlessly tiled, and all fully anti-aliased and perfectly matching each other — a real life-saver for artists working on textures for next-gen games. Learn more.
Resolution Independence
All filters in Filter Forge are generated procedurally and don't depend on external bitmaps; therefore, they are resolution-independent. You can render the same filter in any resolution without losing any detail. Learn more.
HDRI Lighting
Instead of the old-style point lights, Filter Forge lighting system uses high dynamic range images that capture real-world lighting conditions. As a result, you get real-world lighting which takes almost no time to set up. Learn more.
16- and 32-Bit Image Modes
Filter Forge uses a full floating-point rendering pipeline, which allows it to support 16-bit and 32-bit image modes in Photoshop.
Floating-Point File Formats
You can save your work in high-precision image formats such as OpenEXR or PFM. Unlike the traditional image formats such as JPG or BMP, these formats use floating-point numbers to store the pixels, which allows to retain every single bit of precision.
Smart Anti-Aliasing
Anti-aliasing, when done in the usual brute-force way, can be devastating to rendering speed. Filter Forge applies anti-aliasing only to those areas of the image that tend to produce aliasing artifacts, which results in vastly improved rendering times. Learn more.
Multi-core CPU Support
Filter Forge rendering engine is built to fully utilize the power of dual-core and quad-core processors. A multi-core processor can speed the rendering up to 96% (83 to 86% is the norm). Once we even saw a speedup of 115% — don't ask, we have no idea how that is possible! Learn more.
Standalone Version
Filter Forge can work as a Photoshop plugin or a standalone application. Actually, the plugin part of Filter Forge is tiny — all it does is sending and retrieving the images. All processing is done within the main application.
Huge Resolutions
The biggest one we tried was 65536x65536 pixels — and it worked! Granted, it took hours, but anyway! Furthermore, the interface remained responsive — we were able to zoom and pan the preview while rendering that monstrosity.
Presets
You can save the settings of any filter as a preset to recall them at any time. All filters included with Filter Forge come with factory presets that give you a glimpse of what a filter can do and provide a good starting point to explore the filter's settings. Learn more.
Randomizer
With Randomizer, you can randomize filter settings in one mouse click — a relief for those who don't want to learn the controls just to explore a filter. You can configure the randomization strength, plus there's a Back button allowing you to return to the previously generated settings in case you click Next too eagerly. Learn more.