Newbie Adobe CS5 Question

Hello Kimber, Welcome to the forum!

Do not feel stupid if you are a beginner and do not know how Filter Forge(FF) works, how would you know if you do not ask? And considering that I have not found any information about the plugin in the FF Help pages or the Wiki

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Kimber when you open filter forge inside Adobe CS5. Is there a way to put in a side bar or some place so that I don't have to reopen the filter each time I want to use it

Well, I am sorry to say that if you are using filter forge inside Adobe CS5, this means that you are using as plugin, and so the answer is no, you can´t use it in any other way, and you have to open the plugin for each image you want to use.

Photoshop feeds the image into filter forge and so then after you can´t load any other external image, unless you use any color controls that maybe in the filter that would override the external image input (only a few) because the other main input is disabled when using the plugin, and although you can save the result without going back to Photoshop you can´t load any new image

Also using FF as a plugin will not let you change and modify the final resolution result as it is disabled

You can change to any filter you may like but having always the same image loaded from Photoshop, to be able to load a new image you have to go back to Photoshop and load a new one

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It makes for very slow work.

The only way to make it faster I can suggest is that there is a hardware workaround for this to make it faster, have a SSD drive for Photoshop instead of a normal hard drive, of curse that is not a good solution, but I have it myself I can tell you that is faster to load.

STANDALONE VERSION VS PLUGIN VERSION

I have made before a thread to know more about the difference between both versions and maybe it could be useful to you

What are the differences between using FF as standalone and as plugin?

There are some good advantages for using plugin vs standalone, and some bad ones, and also the same the other way