Filter Forge Inc., a one-product company, describes its mission with a single line – "To develop the best Photoshop plugin on this planet, period." After more than three years of development, it delivers a product really deserving most absolute compliments. It has surely the potential to revolutionize the digital picture manipulation and creation landscape, as once Kai’s Power Tools did.
In a difference to KPT, which were rather toys, delivering effects heavily used rather by amateurs, Filter Forge can be without compromises described as a professional tool with almost endless possibilities, and yet absolutely easy to use for the final user. The most important feature of Filter Forge – a visual node-based editor, lets one create custom visual effects and procedural textures without a single line of code.
Filter library is a free online repository of filters, created both by the developers and by the users of Filter Forge. Currently, it contains almost 2000 filters, all completely differing from each other.
Filter Forge fully supports the latest version of Adobe Photoshop as a plugin, but can be also used as a standalone application. It also supports Dual-Core CPUs, but does not necessarily require a real high-end workstation. Subjectively, I would say it performs even better than Photoshop’s native filters.
The price of $299 lies surely on the professional level, but it is a truly good investment for every Photoshop power user of any skill level. For the money, you get not a single filter or filter package, but a powerful filter tool with almost no limits. The price can be seen as rather moderate, if you consider that for the money you get a huge library of abstract, organic and amazingly realistic textures and materials, frames, distortions, photo enhancement and manipulation filters.
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