Filter Construction: Best Practices

Not that we'd ever need it, but the Filter Editor provides filter authors with an infinite workspace. Now, don't panic! This really is a great advantage to those who know how to properly make use of all this space.

Think about it: Instead of dumping all your components onto chaotic heaps, forming pasta-like, dense jumbles of nodes, how about doing the opposite? For a change, we could actually arrange our components carefully, thus bringing meaningful structure to our filters. How easy it would suddenly become to maintain clear oversight of the construction process. What a breeze filter maintenance would be. And Oh! What a beautiful garden of learning the Filter Library would be, with all these authors having built such magnificent Filter Trees... Alright, I'm rambling! ;)

In short, when properly used, the infinte workspace allows filter authors to:

• Spread out and organize components to form logical groups.
• Arrange these logical groups into meaningful structures that facilitate filter readability by visually emphasizing the flow of image data.
• Conveniently rearrange logical groups or whole parts of a filter, making radical changes easier.
• Easily get an overview over the structure of a filter (the so-called filter tree).

-- Crapadilla