Product: Filter Forge Releases Update For Filter Forge Beta

Filter Forge today released the first major update to its recently launched beta version of Filter Forge, a new plugin for Adobe Photoshop that allows users to build their own filters, including seamless textures, visual effects, distortions, patterns, and backgrounds. The update fixes several problems, adds new features, and improves the rendering speed. Due to what the company calls "extensive optimizations", Filter Forge's rendering is now up to 3.8 times faster for certain filters. New features include zoomable workspace in the Filter Editor, unlimited number of filter controls and the ability to customize their order, smaller proxy previews for large images, the ability to create new images from scratch, and four new blending modes for the Blend component. Also new in this update are new components to extract minimum/maximum levels and average color from the source image, a new component for creating frame effects, new components to work with the CIE L*a*b* color model, and the ability to load and save PNG files. First publicly released in May 2006, key features of Filter Forge include a visual node-based editor and a free online library of user-created filters to which anyone can contribute. Filter Forge is currently in the public beta testing stage, the final version is planned for release this fall.