Review: Extensis PhotoFrame 2.5

Product Name: PhotoFrame 2.5
Company: Extensis
URL: http://www.extensis.com/photoframe/
Category: Adobe Photoshop Plug-in
Price:
- $199.95 Full Version
- $49.99 upgrade from PhotoFrame 2
- $79.95 upgrade from PhotoFrame 1
Requirements:
- Mac OS 7.5.5 - 9.2.2 or Mac OS X (v 10.1.5 or higher)
- Adobe Photoshop 4.0 - 7.0 or Adobe Elements 2.0 or ImageReady 1.0 - 3.0 or 7.0
- PowerPC or equivalent, 32 MB RAM minimum for Mac OS 7.5.5 - 9.2.2 (128MB RAM recommended)
- Power PC or equivalent, 128 MB RAM minimum for Mac OS X
Rating: 3 bounces - Lustworthy

PhotoFrame Box

PhotoFrame 2.5 is a Mac OS X-ready plug-in that lets you create an unlimited variety of image frames and borders for your digital pictures. If you are a little tired of generic-looking drop shadows or feathered image borders / vignettes created using Photoshop’s default tools, and if you don’t have the time or expertise required to create fancier effects manually with Photoshop, then PhotoFrame can come to your rescue.

Once installed from the Extensis CD, it appears in Photoshop under a new menu heading called “Extensis”, which is also used for all other plug-ins coming from the company (including Intellihance Pro 4.0, reviewed elsewhere). This approach has pros and cons. It effectively separates Extensis’s software from Photoshop’s built-in filters and commands, and adds a menu that you might not have room for in your menu bar, depending on how big your screen is and on how many menu extras you have installed on the right-hand side of the menu bar.

Two Approaches

Using PhotoFrame is fairly straightforward. Open a picture, go to the “Extensis” menu, and choose “PhotoFrame”. The plug-in then opens a separate modal window on top of your existing Photoshop windows and templates. It suffers from some of the same flaws as Extensis’s Intellihance (see review), in that by default it opens a window that fills your entire screen, no matter how big your screen is. Fortunately, you can resize the window and, once you’ve applied your changes, they stick from one picture editing session to the next.

Once you are in the PhotoFrame window and you’ve customized its appearance to your liking, you are granted access to a cornucopia of options, which can be confusing at first. Essentially, you can choose between applying an “Instant Frame” or applying a frame file.

In the first approach, you create an “instant frame” based on standard shapes such as an ellipsis, a rectangle, a star, a polygon, etc. (with or without round corners), and then you can make all kinds of adjustments, including the usual suspects — creating a drop shadow, blurring the edges, etc. — and much, much more, including things that replicate some of Photoshop’s built-in functionality, such as outer and inner glows, bevel and emboss effects, etc.

Picture with Instant Frame

Using the built-in Photoshop tools has the advantage that many of these effects can be applied without affecting the actual picture layer, as “Effects” that remain editable and can be made visible or invisible at will. On the other hand, PhotoFrame also lets you apply the framing effect you have created as a new layer, which leaves your original layer intact and provides similar — if less flexible — functionality. But PhotoFrame provides additional adjustements that are not as readily available in Photoshop’s own Effects feature. It’s a bit of a toss-up between the two, and if PhotoFrame only included this standard shape-based functionality, it probably wouldn’t be worth your money.

I also found the PhotoFrame interface for such “instant frame” effects a bit confusing at first, no doubt due to my familiarity with Photoshop’s existing features — and also because Extensis doesn’t always use the same terminology. Where Photoshop says “stroke”, for example, Extensis says “border”. On the other hand, Photoshop itself confusingly uses the words “effects” and “layer styles” alternatively to describe the same thing, so Adobe is not exactly leading by example in this area.

Using Frame Files

Where PhotoFrame truly shines, however, is in its vast library of frame picture files. The ones that get installed on your hard drive when you use PhotoFrame’s default installer script are only a small sample of what’s available on the CD, which contains 450 MB’s worth of frame files. In order to use these files, you need to use PhotoFrame’s “Add Frame File” button. Extensis provides all types of frames, which can create the effect of an old photograph, a canvas, film strip, etc.

Collection of frame files

Applying such a frame file, however, is just the first step. Once it’s there, you can make all kinds of adjustments to it. You can rotate it, flip it, resize it. You can add a texture to the frame brackground. You can create a drop shadow between the frame and the picture. You further blur the contours of the frame by applying various filters. The possibilities are simply endless. What PhotoFrame does beautifully is provide you with the building blocks required to create a wide variety of picture framing effects. With these building blocks, there is no limit to what your imagination can come up with.

Picture with frame file

More Effects and Adjustments

PhotoFrame also includes additional features that apply to both the “Instant Frame” approach and the frame file approach. In both cases, you can apply an “Edge” effect to your frame, which can be a “wave”, a “brush stroke” effect, a “diffuse” effect, etc. And each of these effects can be further adjusted. You can also apply up to four different “Edge” effects to your frame.

In fact, it should be noted that you can also apply a combination of multiple frames to your picture directly from within PhotoFrame. In other words, you can have both an “Instant Frame” based on a standard shape and a frame based on a frame picture file, combined. You can in fact load up to 32 different frames. It’s probably way too many for most users — but the potential is there.

Then, once you’ve created a framing design that you like, you can of course save it as a preset, which will then be available directly through the “PhotoFrame” submenu from within Photoshop, without your having to go through the PhotoFrame window again.

Using PhotoFrame is a lot of fun, and you can create framing designs that are suitable both for the web and for printed media. Here again, thanks to the integration of plug-ins within the Photoshop environment, you can use framing effects created in PhotoFrame for batch processing via the Actions architecture.

Some Issues

There are a few issues with the PhotoFrame product, however. First of all, it’s not the most stable product I’ve used. It crashed the Photoshop application itself on a couple of occasions when I clicked on the “Apply” button within the PhotoFrame application (but the crash didn’t prevent PhotoFrame from saving the adjustments I had made to my frame design, so the loss was minimal).

Then there is the issue of browsing through its collection of frame files. The files can of course be selected individually in the File Open dialog or in the Finder, but the preview image shown in Mac OS X’s “Preview” column is a very blocky, low-resolution thumbnail that is pretty much useless. Extensis actually included a catalog file for all the frame files which uses the company’s Portfolio digital asset cataloguing solution. But in order to use the catalog file, you need to use the included Portfolio Browser application, which is… a Classic application! Even though Extensis recently released a Mac OS X-ready version of the Portfolio application itself, they have not yet updated the Portfolio Browser freeware application. I checked their web site and there is no mention of an OS X version coming. I also sent an email to their public relations department about the issue, and have yet to receive an answer. Needless to say, having to use a Classic application to browse the large collection of frame files is utterly inconvenient.

There are also some performance issues with PhotoFrame. I found that, generally speaking, on my dual 1.25 GHz G4, the process of applying textures or redrawing effects after an adjustment was rather slow. While I am no expert in software development, it doesn’t seem to me that these functions should not be too highly demanding in terms of performance. I also wonder if they make use of the Velocity Engine in my G4 processors. I have doubts.

Conclusion

What really gives PhotoFrame its value (and makes it worth your money) is its large collection of ready-made, yet infinitely adjustable frame picture files. Combined with the various filters and effects that can all be manually added and adjusted within the PhotoFrame window, they enable you to create frame designs that are definitely your own, without requiring too much work and without requiring you to come up with your own frame pictures and be an expert in using Photoshop’s built-in masking tools to apply them to your digital pictures.

If Extensis could improve the overall performance of the tool and release a free update of the Portfolio Browser application for Mac OS X, then they’d have a real winner in their hands.

- Pierre Igot

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