Filter Forge, which lets you create your own Photoshop filter effects, updates to a strong version 2.0. It is available for Mac OS X only.

We have released the long-anticipated second version of Filter Forge. Explore the new possibilities offered by the new powerful Filter Forge and take your creativity to the next level! Filter Forge 2.0 features new lighting options and shadows via ambient occlusion, support for scripting and over 40 new components for creating filters, full HDR support that drastically enhances the level of realism, and much more.

New Photorealistic Lighting
Shadows via Ambient Occlusion
Filter Forge 2.0 takes you beyond the photorealism barrier with its fast and easy-to-use Ambient Occlusion. This shadowing technique calculates how much environmental light can reach a certain point of a surface, and darkens that point accordingly. It's mathematically accurate, it's seamless, and it dramatically enhances the level of realism.

Point/Area Lights
Filter Forge 2.0 lets you create any number of point or area lights that allow you to specify how exactly you want your texture to be lit. You can set up almost any lighting you want – create multiple light sources, make shadows darker by setting negative lights, use 360-degree rotation, and much more.

New Lighting Options
We have completely redesigned the Lighting tab to provide an easier access to the new lightning options. The new interface allows you to adjust all the lighting elements – HDRI environment, surface height, point/area lights, ambient lighting, and ambient occlusion – using a simple unified interface.

Unlimited HDR Colors
Full HDR Support
Filter Forge 2.0 supports high dynamic range (HDR) colors across its entire rendering pipeline, from input images through components to rendered results. Over 60% of Filter Forge components now support HDR colors with unlimited channel values, both positive and negative. You are free to use colors as bright as you want – the Sun's the limit!

Color Inspector
Color Inspector is a tool that shows the exact RGB output values of any map component, right in the Filter Editor. It fully supports unlimited HDR colors and can show any value – huge or small, positive or negative. This tool is essential for debugging and fine-tuning complex filters.

Free Transforms, Shapes, and Particles
Bomber Component
The new Bomber is an incredibly versatile, very fast component that lets you spray multiple image particles in a controlled manner – it lets you specify over 30 particle placement, coloration and randomization parameters, most of which can be mapped with images – which gives you tons of creative power! The Bomber component has an HDR-enabled counterpart which can accept and output HDR colors but has fewer blending modes.

Transform Components (Scale, Rotate and More)
Filter Forge 2.0 includes four new transform components (Scale, Rotate, Flip and Lookup), as well as an updated version of the Offset component. Most inputs of these new components, including point coordinates, can be specified by very large values and can be mapped with components that output HDR colors. Imagine the possibilities!

Polygon and Ellipse Components
Filter Forge 2.0 now includes a Polygon component which lets you generate symmetrical N-gons and stars with adjustable round corners, and an Ellipse component that generates circles and ellipses. These seemingly simple components have a lot of mappable inputs, so their titular shapes can be easily morphed into a variety of other things, often quite unexpected.

Free Gradients and Shapes
Filter Forge 2.0 now includes a versatile Free Gradient component with three gradient modes (Linear, Radial and Angular) and arbitrary endpoint coordinates that can be mapped with HDR values. Besides, non-seamless versions of the Ellipse and Polygon components and a brand-new Free Rectangle component are not constrained by the image boundaries.

Math and Scripting
Lua Scripting
Filter Forge 2.0 introduces probably the most significant improvement in its history – scripting! Basically, scripting allows you to implement your own components with custom inputs and internal logic. Scripts in Filter Forge 2.0 are written in Lua, a blazing-fast scripting language held by numerous developers as a number one choice for embedded scripting.

RGB Math Components
Filter Forge 2.0 includes 24 new RGB Math components that operate on RGB color channels include arithmetic, trigonometry, power, roots and logarithms, rounding, conditional operations, linear interpolation and directional derivatives. Due to the newly-added support for unlimited HDR colors, these new components can operate on unlimited numeric values from tiny fractions to trillions, positive or negative.

Other Additions
Instant Filter Search
To make life easier for people with large filter collections, Filter Forge 2.0 introduces an instant filter search that lets you quickly find filters as you type, searching filter names, descriptions, authors and keywords, and displaying the results immediately. No more fuss with the categories – just type what you want and get it in less than a second!

Median, Minimum, Maximum and Percentile Components
With these new components, you can now perform minimum, median, maximum and custom-percentile filtering. The Median and Percentile components are especially handy for creating a wide variety of artistic effects, thanks to their ability to simplify the source image by removing small details while preserving the edges.

Non-Seamless Filters
Since the beginning, Filter Forge was all about seamless textures. But times are changing – Filter Forge 2.0 is no longer confined to seamlessly-tiled filters. Unrestricted, non-tiled textures and effects are now first-class citizens of Filter Forge. Support for non-seamless filters enables long-requested features: unrestricted transforms (Scale, Rotate, Offset, Flip and Lookup) and non-tiled Free Gradient, Ellipse, Polygon and Rectangle components.

Pricing
There are three editions of this Mac-only application:

1. Basic: $89 on sale now; normally $149
2. Standard: $149 on sale now; normally $249
Professional: $239 on sale now; normally $399