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Provides: Attractive borders for digital images
Developer: onOneSoftware
Minimum Requirements: Mac OS X v10.3.9, Photoshop CS or CS2 or Elements 3 or 4
Price Range at Press Time: New: $159.95, Upgrade: $69.95
As one could assume by the name, PhotoFrame Pro 3 builds frames for photos. Simply put, just because it's a digital image does not mean it shouldn't have a frame. It can. Frames can either be an artistic removal of pixels along the border of an image or the placement of a "wood-like" or patina border around an image. There are very few images that cannot be enhanced by a frame, which is no different than the images we place in our living room walls. onOne Photoframe Pro 3 does an excellent job of providing us the tools to keep our digital images as good looking as the images in our house. I really like this product, but I have to say from the outset that everything this product does can be done directly with Photoshop. However, you cannot beat the ease and simplicity of doing it with Photoframe Pro.
Originally one of the Photoshop Filters offered by Extensis, Extensis chose to rid themselves of everything but their core products: Portfolio and Suitcase. Now, onOne Software presents the first upgrade to one of the titles purchased from Extensis: PhotoFrame Pro 3.
I reviewed the last version of (the Extensis version of ) Photoframe (v. 2.5) back in April 2003. Over the years, much has changed in some areas and little has changed in other areas. For the new, there is a better UI to see the various frames, the addition to formal "frame" looking frames along with mats, and a significantly improved mechanism to run through various frames for trial. These add a welcome addition to what was before limited to artistically removing pixels from the outside edge of an image.
The main productivity enhancement made to Photoframe is in how the user can see and access the variations of what's available. The best way to show what's new with version 3 is to show what one worked with in version 2.5. As seen below, all of the controls were from these three palette sets.
This worked well, and, for the most part, is the same in the new version. The big difference is in how one accesses the various borders. In the image above, if you clicked on the very top button "Add Frame File...," it brought up an Open window for the user to find and then open the image desired from a standard Finder window as seen below.
This worked, but accessing the frames was removed from doing anything with the frame. Plus, if you got lost as to where these were located on your Mac, you had a bit of a problem finding out where to look.
Now, with version 3, the whole seeking and opening of images is all done from the same palette as seen below. You now have a drop-down menu from which to select the various volumes of border and the subgroups, and from below you can easily see the border and how it will block out parts of your image.
This new Frame Palette and Frame Browser are both a tremendous step forward and a (disappointingly) small step backward...along with one step sideways. The obvious benefits are that the user now has very easy access to over 4,200 provided frames. The step backwards can be seen on the very top in the region called The Frame Layers List. Here, the user can mix and match up to 32 layers of frames and Mattes to create an infinite amount of variations. The catch is that in version 2.5, you could elongate the palette to show all of the layers at one time; now, you can't. You can elongate the whole palette providing display of as many frame variations as one might wish to see limited only by the height of your screen, but there is no way to elongate just the Frame Layers List. As it is, you can display up to six layers, after which you need to scroll. The reality is that if you have (up to) 24 frames not visible, you will get lost.
The step sideways is the listing of the various frames volumes. The terms "Volume 1, Volume 2, etc." do not provide any idea what is in those volumes, leaving the user to spend considerable amount of time searching and digging as to what is in any given folder. Within each Volume, you have non-informative names such as "wave," "wall" and "mondrian." These are neither informative nor helpful. Cute, perhaps, but if you are in a time squeeze, you are out of luck. At a minimum, it would have been good if there had been a PDF supplied with the program displaying one or two sample frames for every frame type. This would let the user visually scroll through what any given frame might be like without having to sample his way through the entire list.
Every time you double-click on a frame, it gets added above the previous frame. As I played with this version, I thought I was stuck with one of the frustrations I had with the previous version: as you click on more and more frames, you just add to the layers of frames in the Layer section. However, I accidentally found out that if a given layer is active and you press the Option key as you double-click a new frame, the new frame replaces the layer that was active. This was a fantastic discovery and opens up a variety of options. In addition, any rotation, alteration or special effect (e.g., drop shadow) done on the original layer is maintained on any subsequent changes to that layer. This surprising find is one of my favorite updates to this program.
Also added on this palette (but hidden behind the drop-down palette of frames in the image above) is a search field button. This also is both great and, well, not so great. If the word is part of the name of any frame, you can search on that word. So, if you search on "wood," "brush," "orange," or other such word, you will then get all of the frames that have that word. However, what you cannot do is have and/or create keywords. Thus, if you want to look at all trapezoidal shapes, you can't. If you want to look at all round or oval shapes, you can't. Hearts, stars and other shapes of particular designs are invisible to this database. In addition, you cannot add to sets because there are no spaces allowed. That is, you cannot type "wood peel" with the intent of finding all "wood" and all "peel" frames. This is not a database as I know it, but rather a basic, non-boolean search function on available single words.
One of the advantages to having multiple layers is that you can turn layers on and off to see how each design affects the final appearance. onOne did this one shot better and added a new feature called Frameset Preview. What you do is either Shift-click or Control-click (for continuous or discontinuous selections respectively), and, as seen on the image above, on the very bottom is a gear icon which, if pressed, gives you several options, one of which is the Preview window as seen below. You can have as many frames selected as you can wish for, and you can scale them up or down in size. Curiously, if you drag the scale slider (seen on the bottom left of the image below) to the "-" icon, the images get larger, and if you drag to the "+," the images get smaller. I don't get it either. If you do not find what you are looking for, you can click on the Cancel button and try some more. If you do see what you want, you click on the "Add" button and can proceed to fine-tune your image.
As great as this is, there are some caveats that limit the features abilities. The big one is that you can only cross-compare frames that are currently showing in the same sample collection. Thus, you cannot compare, for example, "chisel" frames with "rib" frames unless you select the "All" selection where you can scroll through the greater than 4200 frames. Perhaps the easiest way to do this is to do it the old fashioned way by adding the potential frames to the Frame Layer region and turning the frames on and off.
Before I leave this palette, let me also point out that if there are some frames that you particularly like, you can "save" them to show up in the Favorite selection, as seen in the drop-down menu two images up.
Once you have selected the frame you want, you can scale, move and rotate the frame as desired. What you cannot do is alter the perspective of a frame; that is, grab one corner and move it independently of any other corner.
Rotation is particularly important because when you select any given frame, the frame will "scrunch" itself to fit the image. Most times, you can't see this. But (for example) if you take one of the "realistic" frames, like the wood frames, you may not find a frame with the same aspect ratio as your image. As seen below, I found a frame that was in an acceptable ratio, but was portrait mode, and I needed landscape mode. On the left, you can see that the top and bottom are flattened out, giving a rather bizarre result. So, by simply rotating the frame 90° by hand, I was able to fit the frame to a very pleasing view, as seen below on the right.
As mentioned, you can combine frames for mix and matching. One example of this can be demonstrated by combining the Realistic Frames with the Realistic Mats, as seen below. One of the interesting catches with creating these images comes from creating the frame before the mat. As stated, each time you add a layer, it goes to the top of the list. If you create the frame first, when you create the mat you have to drag it below the frame—layers here act just like layers in Photoshop. The good news is that by selecting the matt in the layers section and pressing the Option key when double-clicking a different mat to see how it might look, the subsequent mat(s) simply takes the place of the previous mat(s).
Lastly, the other pleasant surprise with version 3 is that you can apply a border effect to a layer mask of the image. Under normal use, each frame you add to an image is placed in a new layer above the original image, as seen below.
As many of you know, the bottom-most layer in Photoshop—the Background layer—is locked by default; you cannot do certain things to it such as add a layer mask. However, if you double-click the Background layer, a small window will pop up and give you the option to rename the layer. The default is called Layer 0, and, for most purposes, that's fine.
If you make the background layer a regular layer, you can then, in Photoframe, place the frame not in a new layer but in a layer mask. This gives you a wonderful new collection of opportunities, such as varying the color of the background and now being able to use Photoshop's brush tool to enhance the layer mask. Compare the image above with the image below.
A good tutorial for this can be seen on the Photoframe Tutorial pages. Look at the "New Layer Mask Mode."
Other than these updates for the basic frame construction, the tools for Photoframe have not changed much, as seen below.
Backgrounds, Borders, Glows, Shadows, Edges and Bevels can all be enhanced and/or altered to your creative heart's content. There are an infinite amount of things you can do with this plug-in. [Backgrounds let you set the PhotoFrame to match the color of any background in your work. That is, if you want your photo to "float" on a baby-blue background, you can set the background of the photo to match the background of your page.]
In short, this is a good upgrade. Some of the features—like pressing the Option key to replace a selected layer—are absolutely wonderful. The Layer Mask feature is also wonderful. The new layout to find frames is a good step in the right direction, but with over 4,200 different frames, the mechanism to find the one you want is still profoundly limiting. Adding a full, real, database to Photoframe would do wonders, and if there was a keyword list already created with the ability for the user to input more, it would be fantastic. What they currently have is okay if you know what words to look for. However, when I think of frames, "Sonic Wave" is not a term that generally pops up in my mind. While a PDF displaying samples of all of the frame types would be very helpful, I hope that onOne does not rely only on this approach and considers my other requests as well.
Another aspect that needs to be fixed is the limitation that you cannot expand the size of the layers region of the main palette. If you use this program a lot, you will find this a good upgrade. If you have 2.5, I have to leave the need to upgrade in your hands, as beyond the layer mask capabilities and the layer replacement ability, there's nothing you can't do with 2.5 that you can do with 3, albeit a bit easier on several aspects. If you do not currently own Photoframe Pro, and the thought of framing your photos seems good to you, treat yourself. You'll enjoy it.
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___________ 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.
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