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Digital Light & Color’s Here’s the perfect gift for that photographer/artist in
your life…you! I haven’t come
across another software It’s fast and intuitive.
Once this neat little program is installed, you can either drag your image over
the Frame Explorer icon on your desktop or you can open Frame Explorer and load
your image through the SETTINGS/Image drop-down menu.
The drop-down menus are also
your path to determining whether you’ll see a single or multilayered matte
complete with color and texture inside a frame for which you can set size,
shape, depth, color and surface reflectivity (dull or glossy).
You can set the wall color and room lighting type, too, to really
visualize how the finished print will look.
Understand why artists love this program?
The frame and matte that
initially appear around your image are automatically dimensioned to fit your
image, whether it’s square or rectangular, horizontal or vertical. Let’s
walk through an example so you can get a better idea of how this works with a
panoramic lighthouse image. It opens in Frame Explorer like this:
But, a black frame seems to
overly accentuate the silhouetted landmass. A blue frame would pick up the water
and sky. We can tweak the blue shade
and make it lighter or darker.
The frame edge is too thick,
though, still overpowering the picture. Let’s see how a thin blue metal frame
would look instead. Better! But, now the multiple matte is overpowering.
Let’s back up and try a
different approach by simplifying our presentation to a single matte.
That’s better! But now the
matte seems too bright and flat. Let’s soften the matte’s impact on this
subtle scene by using a textured matte and adding a thin inner matte as a blue
inner “border.”
Hmm? Maybe if we used more
of a blue-tinted canvas matte finish.
Almost there! I
liked the thin blue metal frame best – rounded of course. And an off-center,
bottom-weighted museum matte cut might look more polished. Only one more thing
to consider. How will it look where
it’s going to hang on a white wall lit by northern daylight? Let’s change
our viewing environment’s settings to show that as well.
Ahh! That’s it! Perfect! And so is Frame Explorer in your digital darkroom! It’s the perfect gift for that artist/photographer in your life! Pricing
& Availability: Frame
Explorer is available as a download directly from Cambridge, MA-based Digital
Light & Color on their web site www.dl-c.com
for $39.95. System Requirements:The initial version 1.0 of
Frame Explorer operates only under Windows 98, 98SE, ME, 2000 and XP. |
