Filter Forge

Professional designers, photographers, and computer creatives will find in Filter Forge a high-end professional utility to produce their own image filters, effects, and textures.

This is not a tool for beginners, even though it has been designed to be as intuitive as possible for all kind of users. It requires a powerful computer with plenty of resources, and it can be used as a stand-alone tool or as a Photoshop plug-in.

The program comes with an extensive library of textures and filters, with thousands of designs that you can customize to your own liking or fit the requirements of your next project, thus enlarging the existing database with your own creations. Filters are divided into two main categories – textures and effects, and each of them includes around half a dozen subcategories, such as frames, organic, stone, or techno for the textures, and distortion, creative, or photo for the effects. Under these two main subcategories, you’ll find all the factory presets that you can use to produce your own filter using the filter editor.

The possibilities are endless – the program’s filter editor also comes with custom filters that you can modify and adapt to fit your needs. It is a node-based environment, where joining and combining textures and effects is as simple as selecting, dragging, and merging those node-like effects at the desired location within the tree-like structure that the program creates for every filter.

Filter Forge is fully compatible with the latest versions of Photoshop (including the latest CC 2019), Corel Photo-Paint and Paint Shop Pro, Serif PhotoPlus, Affinity Photo, etc. It supports only the latest versions of Windows (from 7 onwards) and requires a 64-bit PC with as much RAM and hard drive as you can afford. Its tag price is also on the “professional” side.