One of the many interesting features I find useful in the new Pentax K-7 is the built-in digital filter.
Engage the Digital Filter mode
With the K-7, filters can be applied in two ways: firstly, by switching on the Digital Filter mode in the shooting mode through the menu system. From here you can choose from eight Digital Filters namely Toy Camera, Retro, High Contrast, Extract Color, Soft, Star Burst, Fish-eye and Custom Filter.
For each of the options there is a sub menu where you can tweak the filter further, for instance under the Toy Camera filter, you can adjust the shading level, blur level and tone break. You can preview how the image would look like using the “check” function.
Digital Filter customisation
Secondly, you can also apply filters to images already captured on the memory card under the playback mode. Select an image and then apply the filter.
Under the playback mode you can apply 16 more digital filters namely Toy Camera, Retro, High Contrast, Extract Color, Water Color, Pastel, Miniature, Base Parameter, Monochrome, Color, Soft, Star Burst, Fish-eye, Slim, HDR and Custom Filter and save the data as new images.
But this is not yet the end. You can repeat the process many times over, for instance, by combining the Toy Camera filter with Base Parameter adjustment to make another image — let’s call it Image A.
On Image A, you can apply other filters, such as Customs Filter, to make a completely new picture — Image B. You can further apply filters on Image B to make Image C, D, E, F and so on.
Here are some of the examples of how these filters work. The last image is the original.
