All right. So now you're happy with the position and size of your text and preview window. All that's left is to paste in your graphic. So just type Command-V to paste it. Then position it wherever you want. You can paste in any number of graphics here, assuming ResEdit has been given enough memory to handle them. If not, you'll need to quit ResEdit and assign more memory to it, as described above. (You'll know if you haven't given it enough memory by the fact that your graphics are not being pasted in.)

This is the final appearance as seen from within ResEdit. When you open up the filter in Photoshop,
the gray areas and text boxes will be replaced by the proper elements.

If your new graphics cover up your functional interface elements, just move them into a better position. You can arrange these elements over your graphics, but the results can be iffy. To do so, just cut the elements using Command-X, and then paste them back in. When you paste them back in, they automatically more to the top of the layer order. Sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn't. You won't know until you try out your filter. Whatever you do, don't cut all of the elements at once. This seems to confuse ResEdit and causes it to reassign functionality to each element. (For example, your preview window might become the "OK" button, even though it still looks like the preview window. I learned this the hard way.)

When you're all done laying out your interface, save your file and quit ResEdit. Now move your redesigned filter into the Photoshop Plug-Ins folder and test it out. (Of course, you'll need to quit and relaunch Photoshop to load your new filter.) Voila! You now have your very own customized filter. (If things didn't work out, you can either open the same file in ResEdit and make changes or start from scratch with a fresh duplicate of your filter.)

Next week we'll get back into the Filter Factory and look at some more complex functions for creating filter effects.

Dave Nagel is the producer of Creative Mac and Digital Media Designer; host of the Creative Mac, Adobe InDesign, Adobe LiveMotion and Synthetik Studio Artist WWUGs; and executive producer of Creative Mac, Digital Media Designer, Digital Pro Sound, Digital Webcast, Plug-in Central, Presentation Master, ProAudio.net and Video Systems sites. All are part of the Digital Media Net family of online industry hubs.