Memory Dots
Click a memory dot on the interface and PGE 6 remembers your current settings. You can explore with your design ideas and come back to where you were with a single click.

14 Artistic Effects For Photos
Here's a list of the Artistic Effects that are part of the package:

• Acid Edge - Brush on acid etched looks to your images and edges.
• Montage - Combine multiple edges and effects together in a single composition to form a montage effect.
• Ambient Brush - Lifts sections of the image up through patterned edges and shapes.
• Photo Border - Add interesting borders around your image using border shapes and 3D depth tools.
• Burned Edge - Burn away parts of your image with this photo-realistic edge burning brush.
• Photo Tabs - Add photo tabs around your images using both traditional or modern styles combined with 3D depth effects.
• Distort Edge - Brush on distortion effects to the edges to customize the look and style of the effect.
• Putty Edges - Use Putty Edges to reshape and adjust the edges to better fit your images and needs.
• Edge Brush - Brush on natural media styled effects using any of the 230 brush effects included with PGE 6.
• Smudged Edge - Gives edges a smudged, softened appearance wherever the brush is applied.
• Edges - Over 10,000 edges that enhance images by giving them shape and dimension.
• Transfer - Simulates the traditional darkroom transferring the inks from an instamatic photo onto thin paper and then brushing on wrinkles.
• Frames - 175 Professionally created frames that can be wrapped around your images to create stunning results.
• Vignette - Soft gradient vignettes can be applied to shapes and thousands of different edge styles to give customized feathered images.

Summary
This is a great way to quickly produce outstanding photo edges, photo frames, and photo borders. But is it worth $179? Only if you plan on using it repeatedly. So if you don't need this kind of firepower, learning some simple Photoshop tricks will help you in the short term and save you some money. The point of this program is that it removes the time consuming trial-and-error part of designing multiple effects by delivering them to you almost completely ready to go.

Photo/Graphic Edges 7.0 Platinum Edition
Here's our review of the recently released Photo/Graphic Edges 7.0 Platinum Edition Photoshop Plugin package.

Auto FX Photo/Graphic Edges 7.0 Platinum Edition (PGE) adds multiple framing styles to any type of image, the main focus being the modification of photograph borders to give them flare and definitive style. PGE can work either as a stand-alone application or as a plug-in for various image-editing programs (Adobe Photoshop being the predominant choice).

The program is relatively easy to use and has an intuitive learning curve. Each style palette is similar in its functionality so that once you have mastered how to make adjustments on one, you can apply the same techniques to the others. When encountering a command/button/icon you aren't familiar with, simply hover your mouse over it and a short description with instructions is displayed.

Effects and borders are added as Effect Layers over the original image. You can adjust the layers as you want: turn them on or off, or use multiple layers together. All the while, your original artwork remains unaffected.

When an Effect Layer is added or selected, the option palette appears, giving you numerous adjustment options. These include mood, lighting, background colour, feathering and width among others. You can choose from a variety of border styles with descriptive tags like "Acid Edge," "Montage" and "Grunge." Within each of these styles there are numerous preset variations on the same themes.

For an amateur, this program will give lots of options, ease of use and generally fast results. The built-in presets do the time-consuming work of design and illustration for you. PGE can create impressive final results that can be used in digital or print format. On the other hand, a user with substantial image-editing and illustration skills could eventually find this software limiting since all of these styles could potentially be recreated using conventional applications but with a much more unique and original look.

Photo/Graphic Edges 7.0 Platinum Edition includes both a Photoshop plug-in and stand-alone application version for Macintosh OS X (all versions) and Windows 2000 / XP / Vista. Visit the AUto FX site to download a free demo version and to watch free training videos on this product.

Photoshop CS4 & Photoshop CS4 Extended - Best Deals From Adobe

Photoshop CS4 and Photoshop CS4 Extended feature a newly refined, tab-based interface in a single, integrated window, with self-adjusting panels arranged in docked groups. Automatically keeping tools well organized and away from your work area means you get greater efficiency, less clutter, and better results, faster than before.

Delivering all the features of Adobe Photoshop CS4 software, including the new Adjustments and Masks panels, Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended also provides breakthrough 3D editing and compositing power to paint directly on 3D models, create 3D animations, convert 2D images to 3D objects, and more; richer motion graphics editing; and more powerful and flexible image analysis and tracking. Learn more on our Photoshop CS4 Tutorials Page. To download the free trial, see details on our Photoshop CS4 Free Trial Download Page.

Find upgrade options and package deals at the Adobe USA Store. Teachers and students get special pricing at the Adobe Education Store. You can also buy in your country currency and language at the following Adobe International Stores:
Adobe United Kingdom  |  Adobe Germany  |  Adobe France  |  Adobe Eastern Europe

Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium - Complete CS4 Bundle

Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium software is the designer's dream toolkit for print, web, and mobile publishing. Creativity is rarely confined to one medium, so put your vector illustrations in motion, moving fluidly between Adobe Illustrator CS4 and Adobe Flash CS4 Professional. And use Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended to design and slice a web page for publishing with Adobe Dreamweaver CS4.

Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium combines essential tools for producing everything from professional page layouts to rich interactive experiences in a unified, intuitive environment. Also includes Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro, Adobe InDesign CS4, plus Adobe Fireworks CS4.

Buy now or download the free trial at the Adobe USA Store, or buy in your country currency and language at the following Adobe International Stores:
Adobe United Kingdom  |  Adobe Germany  |  Adobe France  |  Adobe Eastern Europe



RELATED SOFTWARE:
PhotoFrame Pro 3.0 From onOne Software
Photo Frames, Borders & Edges
Review by Jennifer Apple

EXCLUSIVE 10% DISCOUNT
Enter discount coupon code PSSPPT06 during the checkout process for an instant 10% discount exclusively for PhotoshopSupport.com visitors. PhotoFrame Pro 3 is available from onOne Software.

PhotoFrame Pro 3 — Top Photo Frame Plugin
Save yourself an expensive trip to a professional framing shop with PhotoFrame Pro, a brilliant new program from onOne Software. You can easily create realistic framing effects for your digital photo images, right down to including your choice of matting. You're not limited to what you might ordinarily find in real-life, however, as you can also play around with 1000+ design options to create your own unique edging effects

PhotoFrame Pro 3 offers an upgraded batch of new features, making this plug-in even more of a valuable asset for the professional graphic designer or amateur digital photographer alike! The folks at onOne software have compiled what is arguably the most comprehensive collection of border and edge effects available on the plugin market right now. You can treat your digital images to the thousands of new frames offered in PhotoFrame Pro 3, ranging from crisp black and white to brilliant RGB color — from abstract edging effects to realistic frame-and-matte simulations.

Browse Before You Buy
onOne Software truly seem to have the customer's best interests at heart, as you can tell by the fact that they've set it up so that you can download a free, 30 day trial version of PhotoFrame Pro 3 from their main website. As well, just to be sure that you have full knowledge of what this plug-in entails before you hand over your hard-earned dollars, they've also created an online gallery of all new frames included in the Pro 3 version that you can browse through.

New Frame Browser Makes Selecting Photo Frames Simple & Easy
While the idea of having thousands of frames at your fingertips might be a little intimidating, Photo Frame Pro 3 has introduced a new Frame Browser that greatly simplifies the process of selecting a suitable frame for your digital image. This browser allows you to search the frame directory by category and save your favorite frames for easy future use. All frames appear as thumbnail images — and when you come across a frame that you'd like to apply to your image, you simply click on the thumbnail and that's it.

The Frame Preview Grid
To help you even further in terms of frame selection, PhotoFrame Pro 3 offers a new Frame Preview Grid that allows you to get a sense of how a frame will look before you apply it to your digital image. You can even preview several frames at once, with your image remaining constant as the background.

The Random Frame Generator
We all know that sometimes it can be a little tough to get the creative juices flowing. For those instances PhotoFrame Pro 3 has made things easier on us by creating a Random Frame Generator that will automatically add and adjust settings for 3 to 5 random frames. Sometimes you might find that all it takes to spark your creativity is to have one of these randomly generated selections pop up, so make sure to experiment with it. And you'll also find a new Layer Mask Mode to apply a border effect as a layer mask. These are two great additions to this photo frame software.

Customize Your Interface
The PhotoFrame Pro 3 plug-in is incredibly user-friendly, with a new interface that enables you to completely customize your preferred frame settings. No need to spend precious time tweaking options every single time you use it, which will improve the efficiency of your workflow and enable you to easily recreate particular frame settings in the future.

PhotoFrame Pro 3 is also highly compatible with other edge effects plug-in software, letting you import and use frame files from other programs. Given the vast array of frames that PhotoFrame Pro 3 offers, however, it's highly unlikely that you'll even need to take advantage of this option. It easily trumps other similar plugins not only in terms of its variety of framing options, but also in terms of its ease of use.

Free Online Photo Frame Pro Tutorials
At the onOne Software site you can find some free online tutorials that are offered for PhotoFrame Pro 3. Featured in Flash movie format, these tutorials will whisk you through all of the new features. It's almost like PhotoFrame Pro 3 provides you with your very own in-house training, letting you learn at your own pace and in the comfort of your own home or office.

The first tutorial will give you a brief overview of what's new in the Pro 3 version of PhotoFrame and get you up-to-speed quickly so that you can get to work. There's a tutorial that covers the new Frame Palette and Frame Browser features, showing you how to find and apply frames to your digital images even more easily than before. You can take a look at the Layer Mask Mode tutorial to learn how to use this great new feature.

As well, the Frame Preview Grid will show you how to use the Grid to find the perfect frame in no time. This tutorial also shows you how to add depth to your frame by using a drop shadow from within PhotoFrame Pro 3. The last tutorial will take you through a visual tour of all the frames and mattes available, while letting you in on some tips and tricks that will help you optimize your framing experience.

Summary
You might think that framing and matting don't translate well into the digital realm, simply because you lose the hands-on accuracy of the traditional, real-world methods. However, you have no worries with Photo Frames – it provides you with a built-in frame browser that helps you find just the right frame border for your image, as well as a frame preview grid that lets you preview the effects of multiple frames simultaneously, using your image as the background.

Watch your digital image workflow become streamlined, as you work with the time-saving features included in onOne. You can save your favorite frames for easy access in the future. Additionally, you can personalize your user interface so that your custom frame settings are saved for easy use. Pop over to the website, where you can download a free, 30 day trial edition of Photo Frame – you'll quickly see for yourself that it's as good as we've told you!

EXCLUSIVE 10% DISCOUNT
Enter discount coupon code PSSPPT06 during the checkout process for an instant 10% discount exclusively for PhotoshopSupport.com visitors. PhotoFrame Pro 3 is available from onOne Software.

Exclusive Special Offer - Fluid Mask 2.0 - $189

Fluid Mask 2.0 is based on breakthrough segmentation technology inspired by the way the eye, optic nerve and brain perform visual processing. When an image is loaded, Fluid Mask's segmentation engine analyses the distribution of colors, finding the natural groups within the image. Together with information calculated about edges, gradients and textures, a model is constructed which divides the images into objects.

Vertus Software is offering Fluid Mask at the special 'friends and partner' discounted rate of just $189 - PLUS free upgrades for the next 6 months.

This is an exclusive offer to visitors of PhotoshopSupport.com. To qualify, visit the Fluid Mask Discount Price page. Find out more about Fluid Mask on our special Fluid Mask Page.

Exclusive 20% Discount On Select Total Training Products & Bundles

To redeem our exclusive discount coupon, use promotion code save20pss in your shopping cart. You could save hundreds of dollars. Use this special link to see the full offer.

Total Training for Adobe Photoshop
Learn Adobe Photoshop with 21 hours of interactive Adobe Photoshop tutorials. This is training for real-world situations and includes additional tips and techniques used by the pros.

Regular Price: $299.99 (take 20% off with coupon)

SiteGrinder 2 - Photoshop Plugin

There often seems to be a strict division of labor within the world of web design and development. Creative professionals tend to stick to the Photoshop domain, while those well-versed in scripting are left to the task of implementing their work. Indeed, the two realms are quite different from each other, to which any of us even vaguely familiar with either can easily attest.

Essentially, Photoshop is a no-holds-barred design studio, offering the artist a seemingly endless array of creative options. On the other hand, HTML, CSS, Java and the like follow strict rules of engagement, requiring the developer to take any number of esoteric concerns into consideration in order to ensure that designs are properly displayed on the web.

Turn Photoshop Into A Complete Web Design Tool
SiteGrinder 2 seeks to bridge this gap between design and development. Basically, this program turns Photoshop into an easy-to-use and fully functional web design tool. With SiteGrinder 2, designers will now have the freedom to totally let their creativity loose and then, without skipping a beat, transfer their designs to the web. Bringing esthetic concerns together with more practical considerations, this program is an amazingly powerful tool that would make a fantastic addition to any web designer's bag of tricks.

Generate Your Web Pages Directly From Photoshop
By generating web pages directly from Photoshop, you'll be able to spend much more time on the creative end of the spectrum, since you'll know right off the bat how well particular designs will translate to the web. No more going back to the Photoshop drawing board after getting a phone call from your development team, telling you that what you had envisioned doesn't have a chance of being displayed on the web. You can immediately visually and interactively test your designs, which permits you to then make changes to either esthetics or functions while it's still relatively early on in the design process.

Pricing and Availability
Mac OS X and Windows versions of the SiteGrinder unlockable demo are available now via download. SiteGrinder 2 can be ordered from Media Lab's online store.

Photoshop Book - Photoshop CS2: Essential Skills - By Mark Galer And Philip Andrews

An inspirational and user-friendly guide to creative image editing, Photoshop CS2: Essential Skills provides direction for photographers and designers alike who have ventured into the realm of the 'digital darkroom.' The book offers a progressive curriculum to guide you through Photoshop with a series of clear, step-by-step projects designed to place knowledge into a practical context.

Whether you simply want to retouch an image, create a glamour makeover or create a highly sophisticated montage - this book will give you the essential skills to complete the work to a professional standard.

The accompanying CD-ROM and website, www.photoshopessentialskills.com, offer additional teaching and learning materials which form a library of indispensable supporting resources including:
• All of the images used in the text
• Over four hours of QuickTime movie tutorials to support the practical projects
• A range of presets (including layer styles, curves, shapes and gradients)
• Camera RAW files
• Free extra chapters in e-book form.

For a free sample chapter see our How To Sharpen An Image In Photoshop tutorial.

Photoshop CS2: Essential Skills (Amazon.com - save 34%)


PHOTO CREDIT: Product logo plus blur on color pools.
© 2004 Eric Martin of Futura Studios