Revision Date: 15 January 2023

Effects Menu

The Effects menu contains nine sub-menus: Artistic, Blurs, Color, Distort, Noise, Object, Photo, Render and Stylize.  These sub-menus contain commands which apply special effects to the active layer or selection.

Note: if new effects have been installed, more submenus may be present than shown here.

Hover over an effect in the menu to see a tool tip containing information about the effect, including the author and DLL location and filename.

Repeat <last used plugin>

The top item in the Effects menu is the most recently used effect (if one has been used).

The keyboard shortcut to repeat the last Effect is Ctrl + F. Using this shortcut or the menu entry directly will reapply the effect with the same parameters. No configuration dialog will be shown.

Plugin Errors

This menu item only appears if errors were encountered loading third-party plugins. It opens the Plugin Errors tab of the Settings Dialog.

Artistic

These effects mimic the traditional drawing mediums ink, pencil, and oil.

Blurs

These blur or defocus the image in various ways. These effects can also be used to give the impression of movement.

Color

The Quantize effect reduces the number of colors in an image.

Distort

These effects distort, transform or convolute the image, often beyond recognition.

Noise

These are used to add or remove digital "noise" from an image.

Object

All effects in this submenu are designed to work on objects (an object is a group of pixels surrounded by transparency). The Drop Shadow effect produces a surrounding shadow around objects

Photo

These five effects are used to modify and enhance digital photographs.

Render

These effects create new patterns, colors and objects. They generally overwrite any data that exists within the active layer or selection.

Stylize

These produce stylized changes to an original based on edge detection. These effects can be useful for producing specialized textures for game development (e.g., bump maps).