The filter dialog and Filter Gallery in Paint by Zaweba

Filters are where an image editor can feel either delightful or frustrating. Delightful when you can see what you are doing and back off a little; frustrating when you wait for a progress bar only to undo the result. Paint by Zaweba gives every filter the same dialog with a live preview and a Strength control, and adds a Filter Gallery for building a look from several effects at once.

What every filter shares

Open any filter and you see its result on the picture as you change the settings. There is no need to apply, judge and undo in a loop.

Strength is the control you will reach for most. It blends the filtered result with the original, so you can push a filter's own settings for character and then dial back the overall effect. A heavy sharpen at a lower strength, or a strong oil paint look at half strength, often gives a more natural result than mild settings at full strength.

Filters respect the selection. Select the sky and only the sky is blurred; feather the selection and the effect fades in gently at the edges. That makes many filters into local tools without any extra steps.

Each filter is one undo step, however many settings you changed in the dialog. And on large pictures, pressing Cancel stops the filter within about a second, so a slow experiment never holds you up.

The Filter Gallery

Filter > Filter Gallery shows thumbnails for six families: Artistic, Brush Strokes, Sketch, Texture, Distort and Stylise. Click a thumbnail to see how it looks on your picture, and adjust its settings at the side.

The gallery's real strength is the stack. You can add a filter, add another on top, reorder them and hide any of them while you compare. A watercolour look might combine a Brush Strokes filter with a Texture filter for the paper. Reordering matters, since texture applied after a paint effect looks different from texture applied before it. Hiding an entry lets you see what each step actually contributes before you commit.

Working non-destructively

Filters change pixels. To keep your options open, duplicate the layer first and filter the copy, then use the layer's opacity, a blend mode or a layer mask to control where and how strongly it shows. Paint's Fade command, Edit > Fade, also lets you lower the opacity or change the blend mode of the last filter straight after applying it.

A small habit that pays off: name the duplicated layer after the filter you used and its key settings. When you come back to the file, you will know what you did.

Choosing the right filter

The filter menu is large, and the families are a good guide. Blur, Sharpen and Noise are the practical repair tools for photos. Distort and Stylise change shapes and edges for graphic effects. Render makes new content such as clouds and textures from nothing. Artistic, Brush Strokes, Sketch and Texture turn photos into illustration styles. Pixelate covers mosaics and halftones. Paint has more families beyond these, and every one uses the same dialog.

Mistakes to avoid with filters

Applying a filter to the wrong layer is the classic slip; check the Layers panel before you start. Another is forgetting a selection is active, then wondering why only part of the image changed. And with artistic filters, try them at the final output size. An effect that looks bold on a phone-sized preview may be lost on a large print, and vice versa.

Once the dialog and the gallery feel familiar, the rest of the filter menu in Paint by Zaweba becomes easy to explore, because every filter in it behaves the same way.