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Provides: Attractive borders for digital images
Developer: OnOneSoftware.com
Requirements: G5 or Intel processor, Mac OS X v10.4 or greater, Photoshop CS2 or greater, Elements 4 or greater, Lightroom 2 and/or Aperture 2.1
Retail Price: $259.95 new, $99.95 upgrade
Availability: Out now

PhotoFrame is a Photoshop plugin that helps you create digital frames for your digital images. When you think back to most any museum trip you've taken, the vast majority of the paintings are presented in a beautiful frame (which sometimes looks better than the image contained therein). Digital images presented on a computer or the web should be no different. With this new release, PhotoFrame has significantly advanced its usability and ease of finding "just the right frame." That's not to say it wasn't easy before; it was. But with each integration of newer versions, OnOne Software has done an even better job of removing the guessing about how each different frame might look with your image and making the final decision based on what you could see. Well, mostly. In this latest release, there are some wonderful improvements along with some strange glitches, all leading to a mostly great new release.

One of the curious artifacts of using Photoshop and other image processing programs is that after doing all the work to enhance and beautify our images, we often overlook and/or ignore packaging our images. My comment about paintings in museums should not be overlooked. A proper frame (and mat) should not only support the printed image, but also set it off, balance the colors, and create a mood. However, just because an image isn't printed, doesn't mean it should not have a frame. For example, one thing I've always done in my reviews is place a drop shadow around each screen shot to give it depth and to make the image stand out from the rest of the text. The drop shadow is, in effect, a frame.

Frames are not terribly hard to create in Photoshop. In fact, if you go to the drop down menu on the upper right of the Actions Panel you will find a whole collection of frames ready to use as actions. What PhotoFrame provides is over a thousand frames with essentially an unlimited number of variations on those frames based on colors, shadows, blending modes, etc., etc. But none of this is new. What's really new and great is that now when you open up PhotoFrame you can see your image and how it would look in any of the frames.

In my review of PhotoFrame (version 3), you can see how searching for frames had been improved in the last version. This version is yet another improvement. Now, visibility of the available frames is about as straightforward as it can get, as seen below. With an image open, when you first select PhotoFrame from either the newly placed OnOne menu (located between the Window and Help menu) or from the File -> Automate menu selection, your image will open in the PhotoFrame library window, as seen below. You can access all Presets (including any that you've made) directly from the OnOne menu, and if you know which Preset you might want to use, you can select it directly—you are done. A more complete explanation of Presets is presented below.

(click on image for full sized view)

A big improvement from previous versions is that users can now see how any given frame will appear on their image. By placing the user's image within the potential frames, makes it significantly easier to see how the image will display. Will the cutout in a given frame inadvertently remove an important part of your image? Now you can quickly see from the getgo to avoid problems early on in the process. You can choose the size of the thumbnails by using a slider on the bottom of the window to display as many as can fit in the window or increase the thumbnail size to such a large size that only one can fit per column. During the choosing process, you can either flag and/or select star ratings for short or long term ease in selection and/or re-finding. In the upper left corner, you can search for specific terms, but be advised that this is still not boolean so you can only search for broad terms. In addition, you can still only place one word items in the search (albeit with hyphens and underlines). Improvements in the image previews have been so extensive that at this point I hope that the searching capabilities will improve in future versions.

When the library first opens, you have available to you over a thousand different frames. You can also do quick filtering by selecting from the various library folders seen on the left hand side. While some of the frames seem very similar, their subtle differences will let you fine-tune any given frame for any given image. By requests from past users, the total number of potential frames has been cut back significantly from previous versions. To accommodate those who still wish to have as many frames to chose from as possible, PhotoFrame 4 users can download the frames from PhotoFrame 3 from this location (or, if this is an upgrade, they can import the version 3 frames they already have from their own computer).

OnOne has made it very straightforward to add new frames, or re-add the old ones. However, what they haven't done is provide any mechanism to control or organize any added frame. Thus, while you may be able to add several thousand of the previous frames that have been dropped, everyone one of them will be placed in a new folder seen on the left hand side of the Library under the title "User." The removal of the over-abundance of frames wasn't all that bad, especially since you had extreme names like "magma," "ice_cube," and "disco_inferno." What in the hell are they? Well the good news/bad news is that you can still have them, but you can't create your own structured folders to guide or organize their use.

Because these old/added frames are all dumped into a new folder called "User," if you already have some of those file in the PhotoFrame 4 folders, that means you might have multiple versions of the same frames. This also means you need to remove the excess frames one-by-one looking for duplicates for discarding. Thus, while PhotoFrame does let you easily add the frames, it's not a smooth or easy result. [Tip: Selecting the option of "Show Frame Only" (explained a bit further down in this review) will assist locating the duplicate frames.]

Meanwhile, if the default frames and/or the old frames are not necessarily to your liking, you can check out the Presets tab (seen in the upper left corner). From there, you can chose from almost 200 composite frames created by Photographic luminaries such as Jack Davis and Rick Sammon. The biggest disappointment to me in this great option with these presets is that none of these show up with your image. Rather, Presets seem to be limited to only display the thumbnails with the image that they were created with. This includes the Presets provided by OnOne and any Presets you create. Fortunately, once you've selected and opened the Preset with your image, your image will properly display within the selected preset.

(click on image for full sized view)

The Library thumbnails (but not Preset thumbnails) can be altered to assist your view of what you are looking at. For example, the default view is to place your image on a black background. There also is an option to have a white background, and if you need to exclusively look at the layer mask that the frame creates, you can elect to see the frame only. The image below shows those three options.

As you scroll through the various available frames, you will see a few that do not seem to make any sense, as they appear mostly white. These are typically "effects" frames and are meant to be added above other frames to (for example) appear as if tape is holding an image onto the frame. As shown below, here's where selecting the black background is necessary to see what you have. In addition, there are also black tape overlays where looking at the frame with a white background is equally as challenging (not shown).

The "tape" example above shows one of the major dynamics of PhotoFrame for creating composites of multiple layers from the various frames and their alterations. As shown below, this one preset from Helen Glassman is created by combining three different "acid_burn" frame options. Each has been resized a bit with different blending modes and color schemes. If you feel like you've hit a wall and want some inspiration, you can also click on the "Add Random" button on the bottom right of the Frame Stack palette and obtain a completely random selection of frames with a wide variety of altered states. My only real complaint with the Frame Stack palette is that you cannot lengthen it so if there are more frames than can fit, you can only move the drag handle to see all of the frames used (but never all at once).

Besides stacking the various frames (and altering their blending modes), you can also add a wide variety of glows, borders, shadows, color changes, bevels, and edges. Instant frame offers you various shape layers to work from to customize your own frame. Once you've created an amazing composite frame, rather than having to re-create it again and again, for subsequent images, you can save that as a preset alongside the other Presets.

By the way, one interface feature I love is whenever there is a drop down menu (such as seen below) or blending modes (whatever), you simply click on the drop down menu once and the menu stays open. So far, so good. However, when you slide the mouse up or down, the action for each selection will change whenever you are over any possible option. Thus,in the Bevel palette below, for example, when you slide from Chrome to Heavy Metal to Metal to Plastic, etc., the image will update with the visual change without your having to formally select the option by clicking. It is not the kind of thing where you drag, slide, and release (see how it looks,) drag, slide, and release (see how it looks,) drag, slide, and release (see how it looks), etc. This is a feature/function that Photoshop should emulate.

One of my favorite new features in PhotoFrame is Batch Processing. If I have a bunch of images I want to process with the same frame over and over, why should I do the repetitive work of a computer? Now, with Batch Processing, I don't. Selected either from the OnOne menu or from the Automate menu selection in the File menu, the Batch Processing window has (up to) six steps. The one limitation of Batch Processing is that you can only use Preset frames, which means you cannot see the frame when selecting. Thus, you need to know from the Preset frame's name which one you want to use. Once you've selected which Preset frame you want to use, you need to select the Source folder (unless you want to process any current open images), the destination (folder), file names (for saving into custom file names with their own numbering), file types (shown below), and whether to add a watermark. I do have to compliment OnOne on this window, as they have really thought out each possible permutation and possibility on this. Disappointingly, I was unable to get the Batch process to initiate from the OnOne menu, and was only able to access it from the File -> Automate menu option.

New with PhotoFrame 4 is an extensive number of video tutorials that are installed into your hard drive so they are always accessible. In addition, many of the same or similar videos can be found on the OnOne website, here. The videos are are mostly very good, albeit some are a bit tedious and they tend to overlap bits of information which may cause some confusion if you saw something in one of them and need to see it again later.

Because the tidbit might be covered in multiple videos, you need to go through multiple videos re-looking for that specific trick. For example, there are multiple videos showing how to change the size of a frame on an image, but only two of the videos happen to show how you can change the size of the image in relation to the frame. Some frames have rather thick borders, meaning that only a portion of the original image shows. If you want more of your image to show, you have to decrease the size of the image to fit within the smaller canvas available in the frame. One of the new features of PhotoFrame 4 is that you now can do this. To re-size the image, all you need to do is to click on your image layer in the Frame Stack palette, and then you can change the size of the image from its current size to a smaller size (there is no up sampling) by using the same "Size" option as seen in the "Background" pallet (two images up in this review).

The Help files from the Help menu suck. They are html based and show up as a new window in your browser. The descriptions are brief and are mostly "this is what can be done" as opposed to "this is how to do it." Because of this, the Help files are essentially worthless. There is no PDF manual, but if it was made by the same people that made the html help files, it would be equally lame.

One of the new additions in PhotoFrame are background images which are amongst the selections in the Frames Library. These are photographs that one is supposed to be placed behind the image leaving you to perform various techniques to make it seem that your image is taped or artistically placed to these background images. While this concept is shown and/or described in both the Help files and the videos, I've found nothing that tells you how to place your image in front of the background image. While you can move the various PhotoFrame frame layers back and forth, I was unable to move my image back and forth in the layers palette. Thus, the whole value and/or benefit of the backgrounds layers is somewhat debatable as I was unable to figure out how to use them.

One of the biggest strengths of PhotoFrame is that you have the option to accept the frame (from within the plugin) and any change will be located in a new and separate layer once you okay the final result and send the image and frame back to Photoshop. (The obvious limitation of this is with Photoshop Elements, which doesn't support layers, so that option is not available.) One tip I can pass on when opening photoshop images with layers is that if you have inadvertently selected a layer when opening an image, you will only see what's on that layer in PhotoFrame. Thus, be sure to select the image layer when opening an image. [Additional tip: if you are looking at images in Bridge, if you hold the "Command-Option-Shift"keys when double-clicking an image, there will be a message asking if you want to "Read the Composite Data Instead." Click OK, and the image will open flattened. You probably will want to do a "Save as…" so you don't lose your multi-layered image.] The ability to apply any frame to the image as well as save the frames as part of a new layer has been with PhotoFrame for some time, as well as the ability to apply the frame as a layer mask. New to PhotoFrame 4 is the ability to save multiple "Frame Stacks" to multiple layers within Photoshop. This is one of those "obvious" additions that is so good. While you can do an amazing amount of tweaking in PhotoFrame to each frame layer, simply put, you can do a whole lot more tweaking in Photoshop.

Let me also slip in here that there are now rulers as well as guides to help the user achieve more accurate placement and alignment.

Finally, also new to PhotoFrame 4 are plugins for either Adobe Lightroom 2 or Apple's Aperture 2.1.

For lightroom, you access PhotoFrame from File (menu)-> Plugin extras-> PhotoFrame. Here, you can access any of the Presets. Again, you need to know which one is which because, similar to the Batch mode in PhotoFrame, you have no visual feedback as to what any Preset frame looks like. You can either do this to one or a whole collection of images, and you can either apply the change to the original or make copies of the images. Alternatively, if you wish to create a new custom frame, you can click on the "Open" button on the bottom of the Lightroom PhotoFrame window and the selected image will open up in PhotoFrame in Photoshop. Obviously you need to own Photoshop to do this. Lastly, you can also run Export from Lightroom and add any PhotoFrame options as part of the Export processes.

For Aperture, go to the Images (menu) -> Edit with -> PhotoFrame (or right-click -> Edit with -> PhotoFrame). Now, like Lightroom, a window will come up for you to select any Preset to process the image with. Here, you can only obtain duplicates, you cannot save to the original file. For custom frames, PhotoFrame will open as a separate application within Lightroom where you have the same interface you'd have within Photoshop. [Note: I do not own a copy of Aperture and was not able to test or verify this. This information came from a PhotoFrame video. I do not know how Aperture deals with layers, so I cannot comment and/or verify whether you can or cannot save out to layers like you can with Photoshop and/or Lightroom.]

In short, this was a tough one to grade. While doing some operations with PhotoFrame, I wanted to scream from the mountain tops how great it was. Yet while working on other dynamics, I just wanted to scream. I am giving PhotoFrame the benefit of the doubt and giving it a 4 "A" review, but admittedly, this is a low 4 "A" and I did toy around with a high 3 "A" but that would not have been fair to some major benefits of PhotoFrame 4. I consider these significant benefits being the Batch mode operations, the improved Library interactivity, and the ability to re-size images. The ability to see how presets look is also a considerable improvement but the inability to see selected images within the preset, as opposed to the image that was used to create the preset is a disappointment--more so when compared to the Library thumbnails.

While I do like the videos and found them good to excellent, the pathetic Help files are, well, pathetic. To provide new features such as the new Backgrounds but no information on how to use them is, well, strange. Lastly, I also found the fact that there is no mechanism to organize any frames you bring in to be, well, bizarre.

However, like I said, the good here is very good but could have been much better. Alas, perhaps a dot release to fix up these details.

___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.