EDIT: Ok, before this turns into a "i'm right, your wrong" argument. You are correct in saying that people can apply these effects outside of Construct's picture editor or with an external program, and I am just asking Ashley if in the future he would consider allowing people to apply the effects inside of the picture editor.
Woah woah woah... woah man, you cant apply just these effects in picture and then its the same like the pixel shader effect, they created them for a reason.
Like for ex. Soften
http://www.mediafire.com/?noio9dzyjom click 1 & 2 to switch box position
We have two circles, one have soften effect other is with already applied effect in picture editor. And yes you could do it with alpha channel but you dont control the effect so swifly like in pixel shaders, you can disable the effect in events and the object is not changed like in pre-made effects, so if you want to change states "with soften and without" you have to make another animation/object or whatever not just "disable effect".