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Filter Forge is an incredibly powerful new Photoshop Plugin. It’s simply amazing. It gives you the power to create your own filters (you must run them from inside Filter Forge though) without any programming knowledge at all. Some technical knowledge about procedural textures and image processing helps a lot but it is not indispensable.
Filter Forge is still in an extremely solid Beta phase and you can apply to become a beta tester. You can even get Filter Forge for free if you contribute to the filter library. Submitters of great filters, which eventually may become very popular, will receive Filter Forge for free, but as they state in their web site: "Sounds simple but don’t expect a giveaway, you will have to earn it".
This article is not a review since I haven’t tested Filter Forge in its fully potential. Instead, I will show you how to create a great looking wet and muddy rock ground texture that could be VERY difficult to do with Photoshop without the help of external plugins.
Just a quick note about Filter Forge: It is an educational program in terms of how you can visualize a diagram of the components of a texture or an effect. Most of the times, we use Photoshop following step by step instructions without really knowing why things happen. This program, instead, displays, in a single view, all the steps or components used to build the texture or filter and you can tweak them in a non-linear way. This feature alone is worth the program’s price in educational terms.
Visit Filter Forge product page to request a Beta testing account and return to this tutorial.
After you successfully applied to Filter Forge Beta and afterwards installed it, lets create a 500×500 pixels blank image in Photoshop. Then go to the top menu bar and select FILTER > Filter Forge (located near the bottom of the Filter pull down menu).
This main window shows the list of the default filters plus the ones you created and the ones you downloaded from the Filter Forge repository. Here you can preview the texture or filter and tweak it with each filter’s interface controls. Now, lets start creating our own filter. Click on the Filter Editor button at the top right corner of the screen. Select "Create a new filter" and press "Open filter editor". You will now enter the Filter Editor window: 
The Filter Editor Window has a preview area at the top left corner, a component settings area on the left, a components list on the right and a working area on the center. Inside the working area you will see a small rectangle with rounded corners. This rectangle is a component and has a small preview window. You can also see a Hand icon and a Loupe icon on top of the preview and work area. Use these tools to zoom and move components in the work area or to zoom and move the image in the preview window.
In Filter Forge you work by placing Components in the work area and connecting them. Each component has its own settings. When you change any of those settings, the rest of the connected components reflect those changes.
With Filter Forge you can create images effects (called Simple Filters) to modify an existing image or totally new textures (called Surfaces) to apply over a blank document or a layer. In this tutorial I will show you how to create this texture: 
So, let’s choose Surface from the Filter Type pull down menu at the left of the screen. You will notice that the small rectangle now shows some different options with green dots on their right side. These dots are present in all components and are used to connect each option with another component. This Component is called the Result component and it is the last component of the whole chain of components.
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