Photofiltre is my photo editing program of choice. It has a bunch of effects built in plus you can add plugins to add extra options for editing your photos. This is my top 6 list of Photofiltre plugins.
Get the plugins here: www.photofiltre-studio.com/plugins/plugins-en.htm
When you download a plugin it comes in a zip format. Just unzip the files. Files include the plugin file ending with the .pfl extension and a text file that explains the plugin. Copy the uncompressed files to the plugins folder in the PhotoFiltre folder. The path is usually: C:\Program Files (x86)\PhotoFiltre 7\Plugins.
Do this with the program closed and then open it. Then on the top menu click on “View” and make sure “Plug-ins bar” is checked and it should appear on the left-hand side of the screen.
So here is some that I like.
Screen capture
Does what it claims. Click on the icon that looks like a camera and the screen capture options pop open. Click on the area you want captured. I chose Desktop and then select the key combination you want to activate the capture. I chose Pause + Shift. So I click on Desktop, the program minimizes, I press on Pause + Shift and my desktop will appear in PhotoFiltre as an image to be edited or saved.
The downside here is that on a dual monitor setup it only captures the main screen.
Create Contact Sheet
If you wanted to create a contact sheet or a page with a bunch thumbnails form a picture folder on your drive, click on the icon that looks like four squares in a square pattern.
In the option page that opens, experiment with the settings as you see fit. I left everything as it aws and just selected my picture folder for this example.
Mirror effect
This one duplicates and reverses your picture and attaches it to either the right hand side of your picture or on the bottom depending on the option you selected.
Import Animated GIF
Sometimes I want to split up a animated GIF to get a extract a frame from it for whatever reasons. If you just try to open it up in PhotoFiltre it treats it has a still picture and only shows one frame. If you want to dissect all frames of a animated GIF you need this plugin.
Be careful opening these because if you got a lot of frames, my example has 70. You have to close each frame individually. You can right click on the empty background (gray area) and choose “close all” but it will still ask you if you want to save each one. Quicker way to close, right-click on taskbar and use the task manager.
HTML Split
Icon looks like the floppy disk save icon. Anybody remember years ago when dial-up internet was king? Web site owners would split up their graphics into sections to make it load up faster? This does that.
It saves an HTML file and your picture in a folder. Look at the picture in the folder and its split up like a puzzle. Here's how my butterfly pic got split up.
Curl
Puts a curl effect in the corner of your picture. Again experiment with the settings for best effects.
Don't be afraid to experiment. That's how you figure things out.