Oil Pastel Effect needs more visuals

[tommyrey Profile]

I love to use the Oil Pastel effect on my photos but the sliders don't seem to correspond to anything I can see visually so I end up wildly moving them back and forth from one extreme to the other and very little seems to change. Why are there two marked radius but no visible radius to see what the sliders are changing? Why is there a slider call Direction but no visible way to see how the direction is changing? Why isn't there a slider to increase or decrease the vignette? Why is there no way to go back to the sliders if you choose to use a mask? There is no back button from the mask screen. What is the difference between the last two sliders which are named exactly the same? I know little clues appear when you hover on the arrows but the clues are worthless without seeing the action.

Tommyrey

[eadams Profile]

In order to understand why the sliders are there you will have to learn a little about the Effect Editor and how effects are created. When you apply the effect to your image a thumbnail of the effect is added in the upper right hand corner of your screen. To see how the effect was made, right click on the thumbnail and select Manual Edit. This will take you to the Effect Editor where you can see all the different treatments applied to the image in the form of nodes. Double-click on a node to view the settings available for the node. Many individual nodes have sliders, and these are often available to the user in the normal SPE user interface when an effect is applied to an image. Since two Gaussian Smart Blur nodes were used in the creation of the Oil Pastel effect, each with a radius slider that was used by the effect author, these two sliders are available to you in the normal user interface when you apply the effect to your image. Although they are both radius sliders, they effect different nodes in the effect.

Just remove the effect from your image by clicking on the little x in the corner of the aforementeioned thumbnail to exit from the Effect Editor without changing anything in the effect.

If you are interested in learning more about how effects are created (or want to create your own effects), I recommend you visit the "Creating Effects" section of the forums where there are many tutorials available http://photoeditor.anthropics.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=15

[Richard Briggs Profile]

To add to this...

It's important to realise that the effects you see and use are not actually part of the SPE product as it were. They are created by a worldwide community using the SPE Editor and the way they are built, the quality, the flexibility offered, etc etc are all down to the original creator. Some are very basic (e.g. only offer ability to fade) whilst others have so many sliders I have no idea what they do!

Regards
Richard