Stuck with Black & White Clouds. Help!

[Sepiana]

Question:

I am trying to apply the Clouds filter (Filter>Render>Clouds). I selected a darker blue for the Foreground and a lighter blue for the Background. However, when I apply this filter, the clouds are being rendered in black & white. What am I doing wrong? Is Elements "misbehaving"? 

Answer:

It looks like you are working with a 16-bit file. When you apply the Clouds filter to a 16-bit file, you will always get black & white colors. Just go to Image>Mode> . . . and select 8-bits/Channel. Once your image has been converted to 8-bit, the clouds will be rendered in the Foreground/Background colors of your choice.

            

[flora]

Hitting Cmd + f will change to the colour of the foreground but doesn't happen every time.  Not sure why. 

So I have my image on a layer and applying the cloud filter obliterates it.   I apply the cloud filter to a new layer above the image and voila.  The foreground colour was blue and the cloud filter turned out blue.   I then clipped it to the image.  I have a feeling it's not supposed to work that way.    Am I right?   I also played with the filters and got some interesting effects particularly with the linear light filter but a lot depends on the colour of the cloud filter.   Might be more useful if I knew what I was doing though.   

[Sepiana]

Sept 23, 2017 2:32:09 GMT flora said:

Hitting Cmd + f will change to the colour of the foreground but doesn't happen every time.  Not sure why. 

When you use the Ctrl/Cmmd-F shortcut, you are telling Elements to apply the filter repeatedly. In the case of the Render>Clouds filter, every time you do Ctrl/Cmmd-F, the clouds patterm will change but whichever Foreground/Background colors you have chosen should not change.

[flora]

Ah that makes sense, Sepiana. I will keep playing with it and see what else I can do.