Manipulating your pictures is only half of the story. The next step is printing and displaying your masterpiece. Most printers offer a borderless printing facility, a lot of people are keen on this idea, after all, they don’t want to spend money on quality paper and have a quarter inch border all the way around. We now have a choice - a thin border, or edge-to-edge pictures. The advantage of having a thin border is that you can put the picture in a frame and the card mount covers the edges. With borderless printing you have to mount the picture on card. But there is another option and that is to make more use of the picture edge area. To this end Extensis have a product called PhotoFrame 2.0. PhotoFrame is a Photoshop plug-in that gives you access to a collection of 1000+ borders and edge effects stored on the application CD.

Original shot	With PhotoFrame added

Installing Photoframe 2.0 was not without hitch. The installation program found the Adobe Photoshop 7 folder but could not find the application. Using the Browse for application option, I navigated to the correct folder and found the Photoshop.exe file, the trouble was the installation wizard was looking for Photoshp.exe and would not install the PhotoFrame plug-in. I manually renamed the Photoshop file and the installation continued without further hitch. Photoshop 7 continues to work without problem, although some of the Photoshop icons are now blank.

What's in the box?

Extensis is now shipping its products in thin DVD style cases, which for reviewers is a blessing, but for people buying its products it means a very slim manual and not many other goodies. Fortunately, the printed Quick Start Guide is a well written overview to the Photoframe application with plenty of illustrations showing what the various palettes are, and can do. Creating your first frame/edge should only take you a matter of minutes. Also in the manual is a four page Gallery showing 51 frames, the other 949 are in an Adobe Acrobat PDF document on the installation CD.

All the Frames are stored on CD and can be viewed in the Acrobat file

Using PhotoFrame 2.0

Open your image in Photoshop and from the menu select Filter > Extensis > PhotoFrame 2.0. The PF plug-in is launched, this occupies the entire window or you can resize it so it becomes a floating palette.

There are ten palettes; Frame, Edge, Instant Frame, Shadow, Glow, Border, Background, Bevel and Texture. By default these are docked in three palette groups, palettes can be dragged out individually or create another palette group, as shown in the screen shot below.

The PhotoFrame 2.0 workspace with the image preview area

Once PhotoFrame is launched you load a frame to work with. On the Frame palette select the type of Frame you want. The Add Frame File loads one of the pre-defined files from the CD. The only problem here is that you have to remember which file you want to use. Although a small thumbnail preview is displayed for the file that is highlighted, it can become tiresome having to click each file in order to see a preview. You can add several Frame files and make up a montage of frames (I didn't find a combination of Frames that looked convincing).

When the Frame File has been loaded the main preview shows the Frame applied with a set of handles. You can alter the size of the border by dragging the handles in or out, or rotate the frame. The Frames are easy to alter and the image updates itself instantly. When you are satisfied with your Frame, click the Apply button. The Frame is applied to the image and you are taken back to Photoshop. A better method is to apply the frame to a layer, click on the Apply to New Layer button and the Frame is applied to its own Layer in Photoshop. This gives you the option to manipulate it further at a later stage, or turn it on and off.

The Frame palette	Only the highlighted file is shown as a thumbnail

Clicking on the Add Instant Frame opens the Instant Frame palette. This contains a set of six vector shapes; Ellipse, Rectangle, Polygon, Star, Arrow and Heart. Each shape has its own custom options. On their own they are basic looking, but you can apply different Edges and achieve some great effects. The eFrame button links you to the Extensis web site where you can buy "even more professionally designed frames".

A choice of 6 Vector style Instant frames	Apply different edges to the Instant Frames

There are many effects you can apply to the Instant frames (and Frame Files) these include; Glow, Shadow, Bevel, Texture, Border and Background. Apply these to an Instant edge and then add a Frame file, the permutations are endless. You also have the option to save your combinations for re-use on other images.

With Frame File	With Instant Frame	Combination of Frames

The Frame Files

There are 1000 Frame Files devided in to 3 volumes. The Frames include; Camera edges, Brushes, Fabrics, Shapes, Film edges etc. There are some very nice Frames which you will use time after time and then there are Frames which you will positively hate. The Film Strips are unimaginative, and rather disappointingly there wasn't the Polaroid style edge. Many of the Frames are very similar but with subtle changes to the edge. The Camera and Watercolour edges are perhaps some of the more interesting Frames.

Verdict

PhotoFrame is an easy application to get to grips with and it will add artistic finishing touches to your images. However, you have to wade through the files to find the frames that suit your picture.

Click here to see a tutorial that has used PhotoFrame 2.0

The background edges needn't be white, a Royal Blue will do

System requirements

Mac
OS 7.5 and higher
Power PC

Windows
Windows 95, 98 and higher, NT, 2000 and XP
Pentium

Price

£159 + vat

Pros:
Easy to use
Lots of Frame Files
Create and save your own Frames

Cons:
A lot of unimaginative Frame Files
No printed guide for files
High price
Installation problem with Photoshop 7

www.extensis.com

© Vincent Oliver 2002 for photo-i