14 DAY TRIAL // Since we are truly living in a digital world, more and more activities can be done by simply using a computer. We no longer come back from a vacation with a photo album containing twenty or fifty pictures. The old photo camera was replaced by a digital camera which, with a memory card of a reasonable size, allows you to take thousands of pictures.
As a development to the photo editing software applications, many software developers have created graphical plugins for various programs. AKVIS Frame Suite is a photo framing plugin that can be added to your photo editor to enrich design and add edge effects to your pictures.
You can choose to install AKVIS Frame Suite as a standalone application or as a plugin for another image editing software. Among the photo editors in which you can install the AKVIS Frame Suite plugin, there are Adobe Photoshop CS2, Adobe Photoshop CS, Corel Paint Shop and Jasc Paint Shop. If the installer doesn't recognize your photo editor, you can select the 'Other photo editors' option and manually assign the plugin to it.
AKVIS Frame Suite is available in eight languages: English, French, Spanish, German, Russian, Italian, Portuguese and Japanese.
At the end of AKVIS Frame Suite's installation process, you can subscribe to the product's newsletter. This way, you will always be up to date with the new releases and the major changes in the application.
AKVIS Frame Suite provides the user with a great variety of picture frames, from the classic and artistic models, to frames with strokes, scratches, squares and even frost effects. The Classic Wooden Frame category alone offers more than 100 types of frames, while the Miscellaneous pattern frame category contains more than 50 different models, including animal prints, fruit patterns, flower petals and coffee beans.
If you don't like your photos simple and boring, you can decorate them with the wide range of frames offered by AKVIS Frame Suite. The frames are fully customizable and if you obtain the perfect frame design that you want to add to other pictures, all you have to do is save that frame preset and use it with as many pictures as you want.
Each frame model has multiple parameters that can be customized, this way you can obtain several completely different images by using the same frame pattern. Just to give some examples, you can set custom values for the frame's color, transparency, texture, pattern and width.
AKVIS Frame Suite's main window displays two tabs with the Before and After views of the selected image and the Library panel, from which you can choose a frame from the given categories. After deciding on a frame, you can see a list of its specific parameters. For each modification of the parameter values, you will have to press the Run button to get a preview.
To get a close-up of the resulted image, you have a zooming range from 5% to 1600%. If you want to zoom on a part of the photo, the small image preview in the right upper corner of the main window acts as a Navigator and allows you to move the selection square across the image.
The Good
AKVIS Frame Suite has an intuitive and easy to use interface, with only one toolbar made up of the strictly necessary buttons, like Open, Save and Print for the picture, Load / Save Preset and the Run transformation button. You can also notice a progress bar in the middle of Akvis Frame Suite's main toolbar that shows you the progress of the selected action.
The Bad
Although AKVIS Frame Suite has a very well-structured help file which explains all the features of the application, it will not open correctly in your browser if the path of the program's directory has spaces inside it. For example, I installed it on a Windows Vista system, in the default directory 'Program Files'. After trying all the possibilities provided by the program (the Help button inside the application and the link in the Start menu group) to view the application's Help, I was only able to open the AKVIS Frame Suite help file by actually writing the path in the browser's address bar. Trying to avoid this problem, I reinstalled Akvis Frame Suite. Even though you have the option to select an installation folder, that only applies if you want to install it as a plugin in other photo editors.
The Truth
AKVIS Frame Suite focuses on one thing only, adding frames to your photos, and does that very well. But to the average user who just wants to frame some family and vacation photos, the application may seem quite expensive at $49. AKVIS Frame Suite is available as a fully-functional 10-day trial, so you will be able to enjoy the program's entire functionality before deciding to buy it.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
