Why Plug-Ins

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Why Plug-Ins: Frames and Border Effects

There are many ways to add a finishing touch to your digital photos. A "finishing touch" might mean different things to different people even. For example, depending on the person, a "finishing touch" might be sharpening, selective dodging and burning, converting to black and white or adding a frame border and edge effect. In this case, we are talking about adding frame border and edge effects.

Adding a frame border or edge effect is a great way to present your digital photos for several reasons. First it sets your photos apart from the thousands of photos that don't have any type of edge effect. The second is it serves as a creative way to show your photos in a slideshow or printed photo album. Finally, it can just be plain old fun to get creative with your photos with this type of effect.

There are many ways in Photoshop that you can add your own edge effects. Using a variety of selection techniques combined with various filters, blend modes and layer masks, you can create some amazing frame border edge effects. A perfect example of this can be found in the book Photoshop Finishing Touches by Dave Cross. We highly encourage you to experiment on your own or with the help of a book like Dave's to come up with ideas and techniques for creating edges for your photos.

For those times however, when creating a new edge effect manually in Photoshop isn't an option (you're on deadline or your creative juices just aren't flowing), consider a Photoshop plugin such as PhotoFrame 3.1. This plugin for Photoshop CS2, CS3 and Photoshop Elements gives you over 4,000 frames and edge effects that have already been professionally created for you and organized into a wide range of categories that are easy to search. The PhotoFrame plug-in lets you combine multiple frames together and change their color, opacity, blur, blend mode and more to create a truely unique edge effect.

Plug-ins like PhotoFrame 3.1 help you maximize the power of Photoshop by letting you create edge effects easier and faster than most can by themselves in Photoshop. Learn more about PhotoFrame 3.1.