Iridium

Well, sooner or later I had to try my hand at metal effects. There are two in this filter set - 'Titanium', and this one. Iridium, apparently, is a metal that forms colourful, iridescent compounds (hence the name); I've never actually seen any iridium, of course, but that didn't stop me naming a filter after it.

The filter works by applying a sinusoidal variation to each of the red, green, and blue channels, and it allows separate control of the frequency and intensity of the effect for each channel. (If that doesn't make sense, don't worry; just keep clicking the random button until you get something pretty!). With some images, the result can be a little messy, so the filter has some built-in smoothing, which usually improves things.

For each of the three colour channels, there are two sliders:
Frequency	This, in effect, controls the number of bands of colour.
Intensity	Controls the strength with which the effect is applied to the corresponding channel.
In addition, there are some controls that have a broader effect:
Subtle/Extreme	This pair of radio buttons controls the way in which the effect is applied to the image. When 'subtle' is selected, the image will always remain more or less recognisable; with 'extreme', however, you can reduce the image to an abstract pattern that bears no similarity to the original at all.
Smoothness	Controls the smoothness of the effect; please be aware that high values will slow down the filter considerably. You have been warned...
Overall strength	Controls the mix of original and processed image.

	This is the result with the default settings - colourful, but still recognisable.
	With more extreme settings, the image becomes more abstract. I hit upon these settings by clicking the random button a couple of times, and liked the result.
	It's hard to believe, but this started out as a nice, harmless picture of my sons Lee and Jack, by a river in Wales. I gave it some extreme Iridium, and an extra shot of Titanium (does that count as an alloy?). What I ended up with was this... well, let's face it, it's an eye-twisting brain-numbing mess. You can click the thumbnail to see it full-size, but you'll need a strong stomach and a lot of patience because the file is about 600Kb.