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Nickolas31394842nla7
Participating Frequently
July 21, 2025
Answered

Give Photoshop's filters an update: using Substance Designer's procedural filters

  • July 21, 2025
  • 3 replies
  • 275 views

Hi there! I am a concept artist and game texture painter, and both me and my employer studio choose Photoshop for our content creation and have done so for years. Photoshop Filters are powerful and useful for many Photoshop users, but many of them are now looking dated, lacking in relevance and in flexibility.

 

Substance Designer is showing Adobe users just how flexible and powerful procedural filters can be. Substance Designer can replicate the Filters that Photoshop offers, and go beyond that with a wide array of more sophisticated nodes and graphs.

 

So I propose an overhaul of the existing Photoshop Filters, taking learnings from Substance Designer, hopefully integrating Substance technology and user interface to increase user cross-compatibility.

 

Proposal below (Apologies for all the details):

1. Use Designer's nodes to re-build the legacy set of Photoshop Filters, and provide them within Photoshop's UI. But expose more user control.

2. Add some new, refreshing, user-friendly high-definition filters as standard. Consider popular community requests such as paint daubs or pastel effects, cinematic fx.

3. Provide users the power to save their filter settings (the sliders and modifiers) in a way that they can return to later. (An example use-case: I currently have more than one preferred visual outcome with Photoshop's Rough Pastels filter. I interchange between multiple slider settings within that Filter. I wish I could save copies of the Filter, and name them whatever I want. I would use names like "Nick's Rough Pastels copy - Chunky", and "Nick's Rough Pastels copy - Smooth", and "Nick's Rough Pastels copy - looks like I'm Underwater".)

4. Re-consider the menu flow for all Filters: some are in menus and category-based sub-menus, and some are hiding in the Filter Gallery. Could they be consolidated somehow?

 

5. Stretch goal: include the graph interface from Designer, allowing Photoshop users to link nodes in interesting ways and create wild new Filters of their own.

6. Stretch Goal: re-create Layer Effects with Substance graphs. Give users the power to build new Layer Effects and unlock truly great possibilities.

 

I believe these ideas could enhance user experience for all types of Photoshop users (Graphic Designers, Game artists, Photographers). It could also connect Photoshop and Substance users in new ways. It could also open up the community market space for User Generated filters.

Correct answer davescm

Do you realise you can use filters created in Substance Designer in the Beta version of Photoshop? You can use pre-made filters or create your own in Substance Designer, exposing the parameters that you require to be used in Photoshop . The menu in Photoshop is Filter > Parameteric Filters, and in Substance Designer there is a template for filters already set up to handle the aspect ratio correction required at the start and end of the node network.

Dave

3 replies

N
Nickolas31394842nla7Author
Participating Frequently
July 22, 2025

Oh wow! Thanks @davescm It sounds like Parameteric Filters are offering exactly what I imagined. I've just googled it and I can see it's really taking off, plenty of exploration and tutelage building on Youtube. I don't currently have the Photoshop beta, but I'll definitely look into that!

 

Thankyou @jazz-y for your excellent suggestions, some clever ways to use Photoshop's existing toolset to store filters' presets, I'll start using those workflows!

davescm
Community Expert
davescmCommunity ExpertCorrect answer
Community Expert
July 21, 2025

Do you realise you can use filters created in Substance Designer in the Beta version of Photoshop? You can use pre-made filters or create your own in Substance Designer, exposing the parameters that you require to be used in Photoshop . The menu in Photoshop is Filter > Parameteric Filters, and in Substance Designer there is a template for filters already set up to handle the aspect ratio correction required at the start and end of the node network.

Dave

    J
    jazz-y
    Legend
    July 21, 2025

    Photoshop is a general-purpose raster image processing standard. This means that it is used by both professionals and beginners. Node structures imply a fairly high entry threshold, as well as a revision of all processes associated with them (for example, the action system in Photoshop is based on recording individual events that tools generate during their use, rather than final states and mutual relationships of several elements), which is unlikely to please the target audience of Photoshop.

     

    Personally, I would not like to see nodes in Photoshop under any circumstances.

     

    In Photoshop, you can convert any layer to a smart object, after which all filters applied to it become dynamic and are arranged in a hierarchy that can be managed (change the position of filters, change their settings, etc.). Such layers can also act as presets (filters can be easily copied from one layer to another). You can also record the sequence of creating a filter in an action and use it later as a preset.

     

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