One the most common questions we have received since the release of our Plug-In Suite 5 is “How do I get to the plug-ins? I only see Mask Pro 4 in the Photoshop CS4 Filter menu. Where are Genuine Fractals, PhotoTools, PhotoFrame, PhotoTune and FocalPoint?” Well, the short answer is that technically, the only “Filter” that we develop here at onOne is Mask Pro 4. The rest of the plug-ins technically are Automation plug-ins and “live” elsewhere within Photoshop.

Genuine Fractals, PhotoTools, PhotoFrame, PhotoTune and FocalPoint are all technically Photoshop Automation plug-ins. As an Automation plugin, you can include any of these plug-ins in an action that you create in Photoshop to speed up your workflow. They can also be included in any batch processing workflow that you may have as well. As an Automation plugin, the plugin will show up in the File > Automation menu.

In previous versions of the onOne Plug-In Suite, to make it easier to find our plug-ins (because quite frankly, you shouldn’t have to know or be concerned with the difference between a Filter and an Automation plug-in or where they live within Photoshop for that matter) we created the onOne Menu which is inserted between the Window and Help menu items in the Photoshop menu bar. However, over the years with changes to both Photoshop and (primarily) the Windows operating system, the creation of this menu has been, how shall I put it… delicate. Fragile. Sometimes flaky and non-existent to be honest. On the Mac OS X platform, it hasn’t been a problem, but not all of you out there use Mac OS X  so we had to find a better, long-term solution to provide a single, consistent and stable place to allow you to access our plug-ins.

Enter the Photoshop CS4 Panel.

You are most likely already familiar with these panels. In fact, you use them everyday. There is a Layers panel, Masks panel, Adjustments panel, etc etc etc. Perhaps the coolest thing about panels is that anybody can create a panel. John Nack has a panel that shows his daily RSS feed from his blog. Julieanne Kost has a daily PS tip panel.

We figured since the onOne menu doesn’t work for everybody in Photoshop CS4 that we would create a panel for our plug-ins. The problem is that while it gets installed automatically when you run the onOne Plug-In Suite 5 installer, it doesn’t actually show up when you relaunch Photoshop. But it’s easy to get it to appear after you’ve run the installer. Here’s what you do.

Simply go to the Window > Extensions menu and then choose onOne. Up pops the new onOne Panel where you can now double-click on any of the product names and go directly into that plug-in. Alternately, if you single-click on a product name, a sub-menu is exposed showing you any preset categories that you have created with that plug-in. Click on a category name and you see the presets in that category. If you double-click on a preset name, that preset will be applied to your photo. Very slick.

The new onOne Palette

Preset categories displayed

So if you have installed Plug-In Suite 5 and you are not sure where all of your favorite plug-ins are located, just go to the Window > Extensions menu and select onOne. You will have a nice new palette with everything in one place. Oh, and by the way, you can dock it alongside your other panels as well by dragging it into either the panel bar or next to a panel that is already open like the Layers panel.

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