.filter is a built-in array iteration method that accepts a predicate which is called against each of its values, and returns a subset of all values that return a truthy value.
That is a lot to unpack in one statement! Let's take a look at that statement piece-by-piece.
I had never heard of the backdrop-filter property until yesterday, but after a couple of hours messing around with it I’m positive that it’s nothing more than magic. This is because it adds filters (like changing the hue, contrast or blur) of the background of an element without changing the text or other elements inside.
This post is the first in a series about the power of CSS.
CSS is getting increasingly powerful, and with features like CSS grid and custom properties (also known as CSS variables), we’re seeing some really creative solutions emerging. The possibilities are still being explored on what CSS can do to make writing UI’s simpler, and that’s exciting!
One of those is now one of my favorite CSS features: filters. Let’s look at how we can use filters to solve a problem you may have encountered when working with SVG as a background image on an element.
Creatives everywhere welcomed the 2016 new year with the spark of a colorizing technique popularized by Spotify’s 2015 Year in Music website (here is last year’s) which introduced bold, duotone images to their brand identity.
Well, thanks to the potentially life-saving powers of SVG, we can create these Photoshop-like “adjustment layers” with SVG filters.
With CSS filter effects and blend modes, we can now leverage various techniques for styling images directly in the browser. However, creating aesthetic theming isn't all that filter effects are good for. You can use filters to indicate hover state, hide passwords, and now—for web performance.
While playing with profiling performance wins of using blend modes for duotone image effects (I'll write up an article on this soon), I discovered something even more exciting. A major image optimization win! The idea is to reduce image contrast in the source image, reducing its file size, then boosting the contrast back up with CSS filters!
Drop shadows. Web designers have loved them for a long time to the extent that we used to fake them with PNG images before CSS Level 3 formally introduced them to the spec as the box-shadow property. I still reach for drop shadows often in my work because they add a nice texture in some contexts, like working with largely flat designs.
Not too long after box-shadow was introduced, a working draft for CSS Filters surfaced and, with it, a method for drop-shadow() that looks a lot like box-shadow at first glance. However, the two are different and it's worth comparing those differences.
Filters are an interesting way to deal with data rendering in Vue but are only useful in a small amount of cases. The first thing to understand about filters is that they aren't replacements for methods, computed values, or watchers, because filters don't transform the data, just the output that the user sees. As of Vue 2.0, there are no built-in filters, we need to construct them ourselves.
While filters such as contrast, saturate, and blur have existed in image editors for some time, delivering them on the web has historically required serving images with those filters already applied. As browsers begin to incorporate filters as part of the web platform, we can begin breaking down complex visual effects into their component parts, and implementing them on the web. This article will examine one such effect, frosted glass, and how CSS filters provide a cleaner, more flexible solution than static images.
The frosted glass effect has been kicking around the internet for a while; we even saw it here on CSS-Tricks back in 2008. The idea behind the effect is relatively simple: just blur and lighten the area behind overlaid content. The content gains higher contrast with its background, but you still maintain a rough idea of what's going on behind it. The CSS-Tricks article uses two images: a standard version and a frosted version (blurred with a white tint). In our example, a card slides up to reveal content, while frosting over the background.
See the Pen Frosted Glass Effect Using Multiple Images by betravis (@betravis) on CodePen.
The markup is relatively simple. We only have a single article that contains content.
<article class="glass down">
<h1>Pelican</h1>
<p>additional content...</p>
</article>We first size everything to the viewport. Then, we overlay a blurred version of the background on top of the original background. Finally, we add a white tint. The overflow is hidden to prevent scrolling and to clip the effect to the .glass element.
html, body, .glass {
width: 100%;
height: 100%;
overflow: hidden;
}
body {
background-image: url('pelican.jpg');
background-size: cover;
}
.glass::before {
display: block;
width: 100%;
height: 100%;
background-image: url('pelican-blurry.jpg');
background-size: cover;
content: ' ';
opacity: 0.4;
}
.glass {
background-color: white;
}The above CSS will create our blurred and lightened overlay. We also need to shift the overlay down to the bottom of the page, leaving just enough space to view the header text. Since the blurred image is a child of the overlay, we also need to shift it back up by the opposite amount in order to keep it aligned with the body background. Because the demo uses transitions, I chose to use CSS transforms rather than the background-attachment property, as CSS transforms can be hardware accelerated.
.glass.down {
transform: translateY(100%) translateY(-7rem);
}
.glass.down::before {
transform: translateY(-100%) translateY(7rem);
}
.glass.up, .glass.up::before {
transform: translateY(0);
}The above technique is straightforward, and has solid browser support. Although I spruced up the demo a bit with transitions, the other required features – generated content, opacity, transforms and background-size – all have solid browser support ranging back to IE 9 (with the exception of Opera Mini).
The duplicate image technique requires maintaining a blurred image along with the original, which can become a pain if you need to reuse the effect for multiple images. For example, responsive designs may require swapping in different images at different screen sizes. Or, template layouts may drop in images dynamically (eg, a different header image for every blog post). For these cases, it would be nice to generate the effect using only the source image. After all, we're just blurring it.
This is where CSS Filters come in handy. They allow us to apply the blur in the browser, using the CSS filter property.
We can adjust the CSS for the frosted glass overlay to be the original image with a blur filter applied.
.glass::before {
background-image: url('pelican-blurry.jpg');
}.glass::before {
background-image: url('pelican.jpg');
filter: blur(5px);
}See the Pen Frosted Glass Effect Using Filter Effects by betravis (@betravis) on CodePen.
Easy peasy, right? Unfortunately, CSS Filters are somewhat new. That means they may be vendor prefixed, and that their browser support is not yet universal. However, filters have a longer history in SVG, and applying SVG filters to HTML content via CSS has wider browser support. You can easily add them as a fallback for when CSS filters are not supported. The above demo actually does just that.
To add an SVG filter, we include some inline SVG in our HTML markup, and reference the filter with a url(). Pro tip: An alternative is to encode the SVG filter and reference as a data url, but that format is a bit more difficult to read in an article.
<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" version="1.1">
<defs>
<filter id="blur">
<feGaussianBlur stdDeviation="5" />
</filter>
</defs>
</svg>.glass::before {
background-image: url('pelican.jpg');
/* Fallback to SVG filters */
filter: url('#blur');
filter: blur(5px);
}There will still be cases where neither CSS nor SVG Filters are supported by a browser. In that case, the user will see text on a lightened (tinted but unblurred) background, which isn't too shabby.
Filters allow us to use effects in the browser that were previously only available in image editors. As an element's style, rather than a rendered image, they are easier to alter and reuse. You can use CSS Filters in current versions of Chrome, Safari, and Opera, and they are under active development in Firefox (no word yet on Internet Explorer). With a little care towards fallback behavior, you can start using them today.
The following is a guest post by Chris Scott. Chris was messing around with SVG filters and how they can be applied to text. I thought this was quite interesting because SVG filters are quite a bit different than CSS filters. Arguably more powerful, as there are more of them and you can do things like bevel/emboss or stroke which you can't in CSS filters. Chris goes into detail here on how it's done including a tool to make it even easier.
There has been a general trend in Web development, for some years now, away from using images in designs. Only a few years ago software companies would favour using an image of a rounded corner as the best "cross-browser" solution; the CSS attribute border-radius has made that technique seem very antiquated today. Titles are another example of this trend, where in the past one may have generated a fancy banner title in Photoshop and used an image to show it on the page. These days we have web fonts at our disposal and CSS3 to help us achieve shadows and other effects. These solutions load much faster, scale better and are more accessible and semantically correct. But there is even more we can do!