Filter Forge Rocks!
Apropos of nothing other than I happened to have just been using it, I thought I’d promote a great tool: Filter Forge
It’s a wonderfully easy to use Photoshop Plug-In and stand-alone graphics application. It benefits from an enormous and ever-growing collection of community-built filters, framing masks and texture generators. The pricing, in the universe of Photoshop Plug-Ins, is extremely reasonable and it’s useful in ways you may never have expected for things like making wallpaper, multimedia and 3D modeling textures and, of course, filter effects for your existing images. The company’s technical support has been friendly and responsive and the application has inherently civilized anti-piracy measures. (I won’t deconstruct them here because they are subtle and customer-polite and yet, inherently, help the maker control piracy.)
I can’t say enough nice things about this tool really and my only complaint is that it could be faster.
If you do more than the most basic fiddling with graphics, if fiddling with graphics is just fun for you, go buy this tool!
BONUS: There’s a 70% off sale running now too: http://www.filterforge.com/buy/ so the entry-level version starts at $44. I bought, and I’m glad I did, the full ‘Pro’ version and the DVD with the snapshot of their full huge filter library but there’s big fun to be had even at the entry level.
***Update***
While in the wrong place for a Mac (Tools->Options rather than <Application Menu> -> Preferences) this is one of the clearest, most polite and most flexible settings panes for the online behavior of any application. Kudos!
Screen Shot of Filter Forge Online Settings
