Sort of a poll. What is your favorite filter for Photoshop?

Do you REALLY want to know? It is Gaussian Blur. Hard to explain. But it is the tool that makes collages great, is needed badly for manipulating masks, alpha channels and will a lot of times be used in combinations with special selections. Like in creating depth of field. And it is great for creating light effects and text stuff. I have fallen in love with blurred layers in different layers modes. Like this pic, which needed more of a movie-look (everybody sends me jpgs these days). Just blurred layers and a bit of color tweaking. For this and many other things its Gaussian Blur.

Standard set??

1st choice: BLUR (the whole list). Like Hoof above stated, it is one of the few set you can't do without. It is critical to my day-to-day work.

2nd choice: NOISE (the whole list). This set too is one that becomes very useful in making photo manipulation and enhancements beliveable.

Third Party Filters?

It would have to be: Digital Elements - **Aurora
it's one of the few that i've found an actual use for...

:)
retrocity**

Now I am thinking of it, indeed retrocity, everything noise, pixel (especially the one with 'Mezzo' in its name) is very much needed when creating 'randomness' as well. Especially when start with the clouds rendering. The Third Party filter I use the most (meanwhile note that I do not use a lot of filters that change the whole image into something else) is actually a free one: Retroscan which is made by Deep Devices. A very nice thing if you want your images to appear as tv-footage.

I've got to go with the big three...Gaussian Blur, Median and High Pass. Gaussian Blur most of all, not so much for its blurring capabilities, but when used with the fade feature under the edit menu (so you can just lighten or just darken or whatever during the blur), it's unbeatable for versatility.

I personally like flowers in the wind

I've never heard of flowers in the wind, but I really like BladePro from flamingpear.com

Gausian Blur all the way

Hmm. Gotta be either Gaussian Blur or Clouds...

From Photoshop's Default Filters I think Unsharp Mask has the most Technical Photographic importance. From the 3rd party filters the KPT Series is hands down the best! = )

noise. great for post-work on men, makes it look like they haven't shaved for a day or so(depending on the closeness, usually about 3.8 is good). don't try to clone or heal after that, tho-had to learn that the hard way.

I like Radial Blur, both for the spin and zoom effects. Liquify is also fun to play around with.