Photo Frame Standard

When you want to add a bit of pizzazz to your photos, try one of neat tricks that pro photographers and scrapbookers use: Put creative edges and frames around your pictures. OnOne Software's PhotoFrame 4.0 offers a nice variety of easy to apply borders, textures, frames and other edge effects.

A Photoshop-compatible plug-in, PhotoFrame's library organizes a thousand frames, overlays, texture adornments, borders and so forth in a familiar Explorer-like tree that keeps the sheer number of effects from being overwhelming. The edges--which include traditional film borders, multiple photo layouts, sloppy borders, etc.--are quite attractive and of professional quality. When you search on a keyword, or simply browse through the library, the photo you currently have open in Photoshop is shown in the thumbnail previews, so you can see exactly how the edge will look on your picture.

Once you have chosen your edge, you then can easily exercise control over size, color, blending, glows and shadows of the edge. Each border is placed as a separate layer within PhotoFrame, and can be applied to the image in Photoshop as a separate layer, giving you flexibility and more creative options.

The professional edition of Photo Frame ($260) adds integration with Adobe Lightroom and Apple Aperture, plus nearly 300 more edges and adornments, designed by respected Photoshop experts, such as Jim DiVitale, Helene Glassman, Kevin Kubota of Kubota Artistic Tools, Rick Sammon, and others.

PhotoFrame offers stylish, professional-quality finishing for photographs, of the type that would usually take quite a bit of time and effort to create in Photoshop. Luckily, with this well-designed plug-in, you don't need advanced imaging skills--your pictures will simply look like you already have them.

Note: This link takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the version of the software appropriate to your system.

-- Sally Wiener Grotta & Daniel Grotta