I'm not generally a fan of art filters / in camera processing… I use Photoshop for processing and have a number of actions which get my images close to the look that I want to achieve (followed by manual tweaking). Typically I've found in-camera processing to use up unnecessary battery, slow down the shot rate and generally produce overly basic looking results.

However, for some of my Japan trip I was stuck without anything v much interesting to shoot and also a PC for some of the time. This led to me playing around witht he art filters a little more than I normally would, focusing on only two modes: Grainy Film mode and Pin Hole. These are the two more heavy handed filters so I figured would yield the most creative results. I was actually pleasantly surprised. In both mode, the LCD refresh rate slows down, with shooting speed impacted even more but despite this, I found both modes (when used sparingly) to be a lot of fun. The grainy film mode is probably the most flexible as it produces a fairly decent BW filter affect and adds noise that produces an interesting character to the image. I found this mode to be most useful when coupled with over exposure (E.g. +1 EV) to deliberately blow highlights and produce a high key effect. The pinhole effect needs to be used with a little more care… While it adds an unusual effect to images, when overused it can quickly grow tiring.

Other than that, there really isn't too much advice to give with regards to these filters. They won't produce effects that couldn't have been obtained using post processing, but if you don't have access to high end editing software, you're feeling lazy or feel like seeing things a little differently, then they can definitely produce interesting results.

Below are a few samples from both of these modes. All of these pictures weere only processed in camera with no PC editing (other than resize for web):