Couple of Noob Questions

Hi Semperdroid:

Welcome to the FF community. I don't know about macs, but i can answer your other questions:

2. If you mean make a stand alone filter (.8bf compatible file), the answer is no. Lots of new people ask this. Saving out exporatble stand alone filters would put FF out of business, so it's reasonable they don't offer it. (Also it would be all but impossible to support technically to all the products which can read .8bf and update to new ff versions).

That said, the basic edition is comparably inexpensive (only $149), and you get access to the whole 7,000+ library of filters. That's less than many other commercial filters (not pointing any fingers *cough*) which offer less filter value for more cost.

3. Yes: use 'threshold' and 'get selection'. Put 'get selection' as your source, the old image 'external image' as the low input, and the filter as your high input. Note this only really works with image filters, not with surface filters (which is doable, but more complicated to describe, and depends on the input filter.)

Personally, I find it better to just create a duplicate layer in pshop, run FF on it, and then turn alpha into selection. Actually, I'll usally make multiple duplicate layer copies, and run multiple FF filters on them, and then blend between them to get a nice end result.

Quote
semperdroid wrote: I saw some hacks on the wiki page, but they look to only apply to 32 bit Photoshop and I am running CS5

Does the suggested workaround for your 32-bit version of CS5?
For automated actions you can also try the batch renderer.

Someone pointed it out to me. Great tool. Thank you for the help.