Cokin Filter System | home | Photo albums | Cokin Color Chart | How It Works | Questions | Cokin Users Guide | Cokin Tips | Links | Exposure chart | Buy Cokin filters
Common filters
This is a brief overview of some common filters. For the Complete Cokin System See the Cokin Users Guide
Star filters are a "must" in your camera bag. They magically produce brilliant stars of light whenever the sun features in a photo. Strong light reflections or artificial lights photographed at night also result in dramatic photos. Depending on the properties of the filter, you get points of light surrounded by 2, 4, 8 or 16 rays. (058, 057, 056, 055) The best effect is achieved against a dark background and with a relatively short exposure. The stars can be positioned as desired by turning the filter. The more powerful and point-shaped the source of light is, the more intense and longer the rays of the star. These filters can also be combined with a number of other filters. They also cause a certain degree of contrast reduction. They can additionally be used as soft-focus attachments
Diffraction filters (040, 041, 042) split the light like a prism. Millions of prismatic rings are engraved on the filter and result in colorful stars. Bright lights against a dark background enhance the effect of these light benders. If you turn the filter during exposure (more than 1/4 s), you get concentric rings of color in place of the stars. Filters work best at enhancing or exaggerating the colors and moods that already exist in the scene.
Filters are tools that can help translate to film either what you physically see or what your imagination sees. This is an important distinction, as many photographers wrongly dismiss the use of filters as being somehow untrue to the purposes of photography. It's often the unknowledgeable use of filters that leads to this misunderstanding or backlash against their use. For example, you can't make 12:00 noon in downtown Los Angeles look like a warm, coffee-sipping, prairie sunset in Montana by simply slapping an orange filter over the lens.
If you don't have a polarizer, stop reading this and get one! I use a polarizer on almost every shot with a blue sky. Without a polarizer, blue skies appear a tepid, light blue on film; with a polarizer filter, they come out in a rich, deep color. The filter works by cutting out reflected glare and it's also useful for water (lakes, ponds), window glass, and tree leaves. A polarizer is more expensive than most other filters but worth the investment.
Regardless of the type of shooting you do, a polarizer is the most useful and versatile filter you can own. It's a very visual filter with which to work: As you rotate it in its mount, the effects are immediately noticeable. A polarizing filter can deepen the color and contrast in a sky (the most intense effects are always 90° from the sun or light source), eliminate glare from wet or reflective surfaces and cut through atmospheric haze to increase clarity and contrast in a scene. Polarizers come in two varieties: Linear and circular. Each has the same effect visually; the difference is just in the way they polarize the light passing through. If you own an auto focus or auto-exposure camera (basically any modern camera), use a 164 circular polarizer, which won't interfere with its automatic functions.
Cokin has an amazing series of color polarizers ( that selectively add color to a scene, rather than just reducing glare as a standard polarizer does. These filters come in color combinations of 173 blue/yellow, 171 red/blue,172 purple/orange and 170 red/green. I have them all and my favorite is the173blue/yellow. Like all polarizers, the effect depends on its orientation and on the polarization of light in the scene, but this filter adds color (blue or yellow) to the polarized areas and overlays the rest of the scene with the filter's complementary color.
Color-Compensating Filters
There are dozens of specialty filters that will correct, alter or compensate for various different light sources or printing situations. Various manufacturers have their own versions that cross-reference to Kodak's numbering system.
The #80A (020) is a dark-blue filter that's great at mimicking the blue hues you often get when taking long exposures at dusk. Filters can reinforce and enhance moods in a photograph, and this filter helps to invoke feelings of serenity or coolness in a scene that, to a lesser extent, already has that visual mood.
The #81B (027) is a slightly yellowish filter that's great at warming up a scene without completely overpowering any cooler colors that may also be present.
The #85 (029) filter is a strong orange color and can be very dramatic when used at sunrise or sunset or, as another example, when photographing the wood on an old weathered barn. Most filter companies offer some variety of sepia filter, which is a darkish brown color and is often employed to mimic the look of old, time weathered, antique images.
Another variety of filters are the fluorescent-correcting FLW 036 and FLD 047 models. They all have a pinkish/magenta hue and are designed to eliminate the greenish color that florescent tubes and mercury vapor lights cast on color film (I've never used them for that). Because these filters are magenta in hue, they also work great for exaggerating or enhancing similar hues in a sunrise or sunset sky, a landscape or in the northern lights.
Enhancing And Intensifying Filters
You can enhance or intensify almost all the colors of the spectrum at once in a photograph by using one of these filters. Each manufacturer has a slightly different version with a slightly different effect on film. Howard Ross' enhancing filter, for example, enhances almost all colors: Reds, oranges, greens, blues and violets; the only color it doesn't help very much is yellow. Because of its strong enhancing effect, it does leave a noticeable magenta color bias in the more neutral hues or tones (whites and grays). Singh-Ray produces a color-intensifying filter that doesn't leave as heavy a footprint on the image; it's subtler to the colors it intensifies. Tiffen , Lee, Cokin and B+W also make enhancing filters whose effect is most noticeable in the warmer hues, such as reds, oranges and browns.
Soft-Focus Filters
It seems ironic that as film and camera manufacturers produce sharper and crisper products, photographers are leaning toward softer, more diffused looks in their images. Romantic, painterly, pastel, moody, soft, muted, dreamlike, foggy and ethereal; these are all terms commonly used to describe the look of diffused images. But there are even more varieties of soft-focus filters than there are adjectives describing them.
Anything you intentionally put in front of your lens can be called a filter. While there are numerous filters commercially available to create soft-focus effects, any number of common household items can be used: Plastic wrap, textured glass, nylon stockings, vegetable grease, Crisco, hair spray or Vaseline smeared onto a clear filter. French photographer Jean Couquin, the father of the Cokin filter system, started his career by dipping, coating and staining clear filters with honey, milk, coffee or anything that might create a unique effect.
Here are some quick tips for using soft-focus filters. The larger the aperture, the more pronounced the diffusion effect will be. Long focal-length lenses require less diffusion than short ones to achieve the same visual effect. Landscape images are usually best with strong diffusion, while portraits are better with a more subtle effect. Bracket your exposures: Diffusion filters often collect light from outside the image area that can mislead the camera meter and cause it to underexpose.
Many photographers are often disappointed when the images they get back from the photo lab don't match their memory of the scenes they had photographed. There are two reasons for this. One has to do with the mind's tendency to embellish and exaggerate memories over the period between shooting and processing. This embellishment is called optimism, an important characteristic we all have to varying degrees. The other reason has to do with the way we perceive light. No film can come close to recording the broad range of tones our eyes can see. That lack of exposure latitude in film is the second reason many photographs don't turn out the way we remember the scene.
This is where graduated filters are very helpful. Graduated filters have a clear bottom half and, starting near their horizontal middle, a gradual application of neutral or colored material that increases in density up to the filter's top. The neutral or colored material absorbs one, two, three or more stops of light, according to its specification.
By using a graduated filter over your lens and positioning the edge of the neutral-density portion on the horizon, you can hold back light from the sky (usually the brightest part of the scene), while allowing foreground light to reach the film unhindered. This reduces the range of light between sky and foreground to something the film can handle.
There's quite an array of graduated filter styles, colors and manufacturers . Some have a very smooth graduation from clear to neutral density
Common filters
Blurring for Speed Effects
If you wish to create an impression of movement when photographing a car using the 209 multi-parallel prism or the 217 super speed attachment, you must look closely at the subject to find details which stand out. The effect of both attachments can be tried out on the rear wing, for example. With the prism shot, the subject is repeated and to some extent superimposed. The super speed filter, on the other hand, no longer shows a clearly recognizable image of the wing, but merely a streaked blur which suggests the speed of a passing car. Particularly clear streak effects can be achieved against a dark and confused back ground, This attachment is to be used with lenses of up to around 250 mm. Always depress the preview button to check the streak effect. This is essential, because wide angle lenses require the widest aperture setting, and telephoto lenses the smallest. The intensity of the streak effect, which can be combined with other colored filters, can be judged remarkably well in the viewfinder of an SLR camera. The Cokin "speed" filter (No. 216) provides an alternative means of creating parallel movement blurs. This is a type of center spot filter, the clear spot being smaller, and positioned nearer the lower edge. This increases the blur effect, and also the degree of diffusion . The super speed can be controlled precisely, though the blur effect is less pronounced. The radial zoom (No. 185) attachment uses the same technique as the "speed" filter. The streaks of light radiating from the center of the frame suggest movement toward the camera. Here again, a mixed and preferably dark background accentuates the radiating streaks and so the apparent impression of motion.
All photos shown on this site are the ownership of the Photographer and are not to be distributed in any way which may violate his/her copyright without permission from the copyright holder.
