I’ve just released an update for our MBP Fine Art Border Tools plugin for Adobe Photoshop, so I wanted to spend a little time today to explain the great new features that are now available. The update is version 1.5.1 so if you already own FAB Tools and don’t see these options, please check the Adobe Plugin Manager and update the plugin if necessary. All of the new features are in the Add Text module, where you can add text to your resized and framed image. Two of these new features were based on suggestions I received from a listener so I’d like to give a shout-out to Roger Jones from the UK and thank Roger for the suggestions and for using FAB Tools!
Also, please note that I’ve just released a 24-minute video to explain these new features, so I’ll embed that here as it will probably be easier to understand these features if you follow along in real-time. Then I’ll go on to explain again below, for those of you that just want to listen, or for Patron members that prefer to read.
Second Text Line (from V1.5)
Second Text Line
From version 1.5 which was released a few days ago in the Adobe Exchange Marketplace, there are now more text customization options than ever! First of all, you can now add a second line of text that you manually enter for your Text Watermark.
All you have to do to use the second line of text is to select the Second Line Text field (inside the green box in this screenshot) and type in your text. This second line will also appear for any text watermarks that you have already configured and can be used just as though you were creating the watermark afresh. When you tab away from the text field your text is automatically saved along with your first line and other options, such as font, font style, and font color.
Once saved, if you don’t need to embed your second line in your watermark, you can either delete the text or uncheck the Activate check box to the right of the Second Line Text field. If you want to change your text regularly, leave the Auto-hide checkbox unchecked, and the field will remain on the screen when the other options are hidden.
Add Custom Fonts
Another new feature in version 1.5 is the ability to add any font that you have installed on your system to the Font pulldown for use in the Text Watermarks. To get started just click on the Add Font button that can be seen after clicking on Show Options in the Add Text module. If you haven’t added a Text Watermark yet, you need to add at least one before these options are visible.
After clicking the Add Font button, you will see six text fields, that you can see in the below screenshot. The first is for the font name, and the following five fields are for the various styles that you commonly find in a font. The name can be anything you want, but so that you can recognize the font, using the Font Name is recommended. For the remaining Postscript name fields, you can use the font file name without the extension, or get the font style name from the Font Book under Applications on a Mac or from the system Font viewer on Windows.
Mac Font Book
These names have to match the actual font names or your custom font will not work. After entering the style names, click the Store Font button, and check the preview to see that the font is working. If you have added more than one font style, also check that the style changes in the preview when selected.
Adding a Custom Font
You can add different styles to the five provided, for example, you might add an Extra Light font style instead of Light, or Extra Bold instead of bold, but note that the style will only be displayed by the available style radio button with the default names. Once you have added a custom font, you can press the Edit Font button that will be displayed when a Custom Font is selected and reopen the font text fields to check or change what you added. There is no limit to the number of fonts that you add.
Note too that the fonts are added to the MBPCustomFonts.txt file that you can find along with the other preference files that are stored. To see your Custom Fonts file and potentially make a backup, go to the Tools module and click on the Show Settings Folder Path button, then copy the path to the clipboard, and paste that path into the dialog that appears when you select the Finder > Go > Go to Folder option on a Mac, or paste the path into the Explorer path field in Windows.
Description Text Wrapping Options
Version 1.5 also introduced two new Description Text wrapping options. The Description text is automatically extracted from your image if you added a description, either in the File Information > Description field in Photoshop, or in another application, like Capture One Pro or Lightroom. If you add a Description in Photoshop, note that you must save and close then reopen the file before MBP FAB Tools will be able to read the Description from the image file. The first of the two new wrapping options is to return after the number of words entered into the first of the two optional fields. Your description will automatically be wrapped after the number of words entered. The second new wrapping option is to wrap when FAB Tools finds a specific character or character string in your Description. By default, this is an opening parenthesis bracket. As you can see in the example screenshot above, I wrapped the description after the two words “The Abyss” by including the remaining Description inside parenthesis. I’ve not limited the character wrap to the first instance of a character, so you could theoretically wrap line after line by including the wrap character multiple times.
Safe Text Scaling
The last major update in this release is the Safe Text Scaling option. As it is now possible to build text watermarks that can potentially overflow the space provided in the border surrounding your resized image, I’ve added the Safe Text Scaling option and turned it on by default, and this will essentially prevent your text from overflowing the border and being cut off.
The cool thing about this is if you do work with multi-line text watermarks, and are happy for them to fill the border space vertically, you can now just set a larger Scale percentage than necessary, and allow the Safe Text Scaling option to resize your text to fit the border automatically. So, for example, instead of trying to find the percentage required to fill the border, which might be say 32%, you can now just specify a 50% border, and leave the rest to FAB Tools. Needless to say, it works with landscape or portrait orientation images, as well as square and panorama images.
If you want to know whether Safe Text Scaling is kicking in, look below the three options under the Text Anchor Target section in the Add Text module while adding a text-based watermark. You’ll see a green message quickly flash onto the screen saying “Text Auto-Scaled!” To actually be on the Add Text screen if you are adding a Watermark during the resizing process, select Apply Web or Print Border from the hamburger menu in the top right of the FAB Tools plugin panel.
OK, so we’ll start to wrap it up there for this week. If you don’t yet own a copy of the MBP Fine Art Border Tools and would like to, you can jump directly to the product page on the Adobe Exchange Marketplace with the short-link https://mbp.ac/fabtmp and you can get to our product page for further details with the link under the Shop menu at the top of this website.
To finish, I’d quickly like to say a huge thank you to Richard, Jim, David, and Kandice, our new patrons. Thank you, alongside the other patrons for your support of the Martin Bailey Photography Podcast.
Thank you for using the MBP Fine Art Border Tools plugin for Adobe Photoshop! This page will help you to get the most of out FAB Tools, as they are affectionately known.
With this set of tools, you will be able to easily frame, resize and watermark your artwork in style. A key goal of FAB Tools in addition to resizing and framing your art is to shift your image up within its frame to provide visual balance as well as create space to add text-based and graphical Watermarks with ultimate positioning freedom.
Autopilot enables fully automated image processing and round-robin from most content management applications for one-click framing for Web or Print, now with 30 media sizes and ten customizable format slots. Automatic Text can be used to get shooting information or Descriptions embedded in your images to dynamically create boilerplates specific to each image, even during Autopilot processing. All settings can also be saved in Presets and recalled per module at any time, saving you from having to keep detailed notes on settings used for various projects.
Video Tutorials
If you prefer to watch, we have a series of videos to walk you through some of the basic operations and introduce new features as they have been added. Use the menu in the top left of the video below to navigate between tutorials.
Dependencies
This plugin requires a full version of Adobe Photoshop 2021 or newer. If you have any problems with FAB Tools please update Photoshop if there is an update available. We generally try to optimize FAB Tools for the latest version of Photoshop. FAB Tools does not work with Photoshop Essentials or Lightroom.
Purchasing FAB Tools
If you do not yet own a copy of MBP Fine Art Border Tools you can find them on the Adobe Marketplace here.
Installation
Installation is automatically performed after purchase from the Adobe Creative Cloud Marketplace. If your new FAB Tools are not automatically installed, in Photoshop open Plugins > Manage Plugins and you should see the MBP Fine Art Border Tools plugin with an Install button. If you bought FAB Tools on a different computer, you may have to wait a while before the plugin appears in the Stock & Marketplace > Manage plugins section as below.
Installing FAB Tools
Updates
When an update is available, there will be an Update button displayed instead of an Install button when you select Manage Plugins from the Plugins menu in Adobe Photoshop.
Uninstallation
Should you need to Uninstall or Disable the plugin for any reason, select Manage Plugins under the Plugin menu in Adobe Photoshop, then click the ellipses to the left of the Installed text and select Uninstall or Disable. You can re-enable or re-install the plugin at any time.
Uninstalling FAB Tools
Launching in Photoshop
If you don’t see the plugin panel, select MBP Fine Art Border Tools under the Plugin menu in Adobe Photoshop. The panel can be free-floating, or docked in a side panel, or added as an icon in a narrow toolbar.
Docking FAB Tools
For ease of use and to enable scrolls bars to scroll on tall tool panels, drag the FAB Tools plugins to the edge of either the right or left side of the Photoshop image area, until you see a blue line as seen in the below screenshot. Once you see the blue line, let go of FAB Tools and they will be docked in that location ready for use.
Docking FAB Tools
FAB Tools Modules
The MBP Fine Art Border Tools are split into multiple modules that perform different tasks based on your requirements. The Web Frame and Print Frame modules can both call the Watermark and Add Text Modules so that you can resize for either Web or Print and add a Watermark or Text with one click once configured. There is also an Autopilot module to run tasks automatically or in Batch Mode and a Presets module to store your settings to recall later. The Tools menu contains some useful tools and reset buttons, as well as some generic options that affect all of FAB Tools.
As the name implies, the Web Frame module is designed to help you resize and frame images for use on the Web. The top three fields are to enter your Long Edge and Short Edge sizes in pixels, and the width of your border. By default, the Border is also set in pixels, but we recommend changing this to use a percentage by selecting the % option below the Border Offset slider.
A pleasing border width to start with is 8%, which represents 8% of the width of the image, or around 100 pixels for an image between 1280 and 1440 pixels wide. If this is too wide for your tastes, try something narrower, such as 60 pixels or 5%, depending on your setting.
The Offset
One of the core goals of the MBP Fine Art Border Tools is to provide you with a way to offset the resized image within the frame. Moving the image up slightly in the frame gives it a more pleasing balance and visual distribution while giving you room to sign your work, or add a watermark and/or text below the image, and we’ll cover that shortly.
The amount you offset or move your image up is personal preference, but moving it up by around 3% gives a very balanced image, especially when adding text or watermarks below the image.
Note too that we use the terms Long Edge and Short Edge instead of height and width because FAB Tools automatically recalculates dimensions depending on whether your image is landscape orientation, portrait orientation, or square. So for landscape orientation images, the long edge is the width, but for portrait orientation images, the long edge becomes the height, and you don’t have to worry about which it is.
Save & Close Checkbox
If you are working on multiple images, for faster processing, there is an option at the bottom of the Web Frame and Print Frame modules to Save and Close the image once processing is complete.
Color Your Frame
You can also change the color of the frame that you apply to both Web and Print Frames. Say, for example, you want to frame an image and move away from the standard white frame that we’ve had so far, all you have to do is open your image and click on the colored square on the left of the two which is the Border color, and you can select a color using the regular Photoshop color patches and sliders, but your mouse pointer will change to a picker so you can also sample any color your want from your image, as you see in this screenshot.
Sampling Frame Colors
Print Frame Module
Print Frame Module
The Print Frame module is for framing for Fine Art Prints. There are 30 presets which, to protect the integrity of the media formats, cannot be modified, other than the border size and vertical offset. If you change the border size it will automatically be saved for future use, and a Revert button will appear, to remind you that you’ve modified the preset and to revert to the preset default border size if necessary.
In addition to the 30 media presets, there are ten customizable formats, based on popular media size and a few square frames. You can take these and make whatever you want. You can enter the Long Edge, Short Edge, Border width, all in millimeters, as well as a custom name for your format and a short description. Each of these fields is saved as you move away from the field. If you ever need to reset a format and start again, just select a saved custom format and hit the Revert button.
Print Resolution
You can also select your resized image resolution. We are not actually able to set the resolution of your images during the resize, but with the value selected for the resolution, we can ensure that your images are the correct size. Resolutions start at 150 ppi which is about the lowest resolution you want to be working with for print. 300 and 600 ppi are common values for printing with Canon printers, and 360 and 720 are common with Epson printers.
The resize algorithm used by Photoshop when resizing is selected automatically and is optimized based on whether you are downsizing or upsizing your image.
Watermark Module
In the Watermark module, you can add graphical watermarks with precision to pretty much any location on your image. Start by selecting one of the nine anchor points, including the four corners, center sides, and the center of the image. From there, you can nudge the watermark up to 100% of the image away from the anchor point.
You can load multiple images and change or delete images easily from a pulldown. You can scale the image to a percentage of the width of your resized image, and change the opacity, which is useful if you are placing a watermark over the image area. Scale and Opacity values are stored separately for each image that you load to your list.
Once you’ve specified your settings, you are ready to apply your watermark. When you are happy with the placement, you can also turn on the checkbox in either of the resize modules to automatically apply the watermark after resizing. There’s no need to worry about the image orientation. We calculate the position based on your image size and orientation, so unless something goes wrong, the watermark will be placed perfectly each time.
You can select to anchor your watermark Inside your resized image or Outside the resized image on the border. Until the image is resized, these options will be displayed in red, because they cannot be used until the image is resized, but your settings will be used as configured. You can apply a watermark anchored to the canvas edge at any time, even without performing a prior resize with the frame.
Add Text Module
The Add Text module gives you the ability to store multiple text strings that can be applied to any location on the image, anchored to your resized image or the canvas. The Inside and Outside image options are displayed in red until you perform a resize, but they can be configured and will be used accordingly when you perform your resize.
To save space when not in use, most of the text options are hidden by default and are opened with a button next to the Scale and Opacity fields, which remain visible for ease of access. When you unhide the text options you have the option to modify the currently selected text or add a new string. Regardless of which you select, your changes are automatically saved, and the font and color options are all saved on a per string basis, so they are recalled with each string as you select it.
Unless you want to confirm or change the settings, you can apply and switch between saved text strings without unhiding the text options, simply by selecting a different string in the Text pulldown. To delete any string, just select the string and hit the Delete Selected button.
Automatic Text
FAB Tools can automatically fetch information from your embedded image data for inclusion in your text watermark! Select information such as the Title, Shutter Speed, Aperture, ISO, Focal Length, Date & Time, Camera, Lens, Artist, and Copyright! You can either replace your watermark text or append your automatic text to it, and there’s an option to split the text over multiple lines if you prefer. There is a new preview feature, so you can see how your text will look before you apply it, including your font and styling.
Second Text Line
Second Text Line (from V1.5)
From version 1.5 released in December 2021, there are now more text customization options than ever! We’ve covered this in the version 1.5 update video in the tutorials that you can view above, but to explain, you can now add a second line of text that you manually enter for your Text Watermark.
All you have to do to use the second line of text is to select the Second Line Text field (inside the green box in this screenshot) and type in your text. When you tab away from the text field your text is automatically saved with your first line and other options, such as font, font style, and font color.
If you don’t need to embed your second line in your watermark, you can either delete the text or uncheck the Activate check box to the right of the Second Line Text field. If you want to change your text regularly, leave the Auto-hide button unchecked, and the field will remain on the screen when the other options are hidden.
Custom Fonts
Please note that due to limitations in the plugin framework, we cannot list and display all fonts that are installed on your system with FAB Tools. We have included 19 fonts by default that represent a wide selection of font styles, and you can add any other fonts on your system manually for use in the Add Text module.
Another new feature in version 1.5 is the ability to add any font that you have installed on your system to the Font pulldown for use in the Text Watermarks. To get started just click on the Add Font button that can be seen after clicking on Show Options in the Add Text module. If you haven’t added a Text Watermark yet, you need to add something before these options are visible.
After clicking the Add Font button, you will see six text fields. The first is for the font name, and the following five fields are for the various styles that you commonly find in a font. The name can be anything you want, but so that you can recognize the font, using the Font Name is recommended. For the remaining Postscript name fields, you can use the font file name without the extension, or get the font style name from the Font Book under Applications on a Mac or from the System Font Viewer on Windows. These names have to match the actual font names or your custom font will not work. After entering the style names, click the Store Font button, and check the preview to see that the font is working. If you have added more than one font style, also check that the style changes in the preview when selected.
Adding a Custom Font
You can add different styles to the five provided, for example, you might add an Extra Light font style instead of Light, or Extra Bold instead of bold, but note that the style will only be displayed by the available style radio button with the default names. Once you have added a custom font, you can press the Edit Font button that will be displayed when a Custom Font is selected and reopen the font text fields to check or change what you added. There is no limit to the number of fonts that you add.
Note too that the fonts are added to the MBPCustomFonts.txt file that you can find along with the other preference files that are stored. To see your Custom Fonts file and potentially make a backup, go to the Tools module and click on the Show Settings Folder Path button, then copy the path to the clipboard, and paste that path into the dialog that appears when you select the Finder > Go > Go to Folder option on a Mac, or paste the path into the Explorer path field in Windows.
Description Text Wrapping Options
Version 1.5 also introduced two new Description Text wrapping options. The Description text is automatically extracted from your image if you added a description, either in the File Information > Description field in Photoshop, or in another application, like Capture One Pro or Lightroom. If you add a Description in Photoshop, note that you must save and close then reopen the file before MBP FAB Tools will be able to read the Description from the image file.
The first of the two new wrapping options is to return after the number of words entered into the first of the two optional fields. Your description will automatically be wrapped after the number of words entered. The second new wrapping option is to wrap when FAB Tools finds a specific character or character string in your Description. By default, this is an opening parenthesis bracket. As you can see in the example screenshot above, I wrapped the description after the two words “The Abyss” by including the remaining Description inside parenthesis. I’ve not limited the character wrap to the first instance of a character, so you could theoretically wrap line after line by including the wrap character multiple times.
Note that the Description formating checkboxes are grayed out when your image has no Description embedded. To add a description in Photoshop, open File Info from the File menu, or add it to the EXIF information in third-party products like Capture One Pro and Lightroom.
Safe Text Scaling
The last major update in this release is the Safe Text Scaling option. As it is now possible to build text watermarks that can potentially overflow the space provided in the border surrounding your resized image, I’ve added the Safe Text Scaling option and turned it on by default, and this will essentially prevent your text from overflowing the border and being cut off.
The cool thing about this is if you do work with multi-line text watermarks, and are happy for them to fill the border space vertically, you can now just set a larger Scale percentage than necessary, and allow the Safe Text Scaling option to resize your text to fit the border automatically. So, for example, instead of trying to find the percentage required to fill the border, which might be say 32%, you can now just specify a 50% border, and leave the rest to FAB Tools. Needless to say, it works with landscape or portrait orientation images, as well as square and panorama images.
If you want to know whether Safe Text Scaling is kicking in, look below the three options under the Text Anchor Target section in the Add Text module while adding a text-based watermark. You’ll see a green message quickly flash onto the screen saying “Text Auto-Scaled!” To actually be on the Add Text screen if you are adding a Watermark during the resizing process, select Apply Web Border from the hamburger menu in the top right of the FAB Tools plugin panel.
Autopilot Module
Autopilot Module
FAB Tools includes a robust Autopilot module. With Autopilot you can now turn on the Add Watermark and Add Text checkboxes on either of the resizing and framing modules and apply your frames in batch. This helps as you try various settings, as you can simply leave Autopilot on, allow it to process your open images, and walk through your images to check how the frames look.
We remember which images have been processed, so your frames won’t be reapplied during that session. However, if you want to apply some changes made, you can simply hit the Revert button to undo your changes, and Autopilot will instantly apply your updated frame and watermarks.
If Autopilot runs too fast for your computer to keep up with, you may see errors that will cause Autopilot to deactivate. If this happens, increase the number of seconds pause between actions with the radio buttons provided. For example, on my iMac Pro with an 8-core CPU, I can select 0.5 seconds pause and batch process twenty or so 50 megapixel TIFF files without any issues. On a 13″ Mac Book Pro though, with a 2-core CPU, one second is generally a long enough pause.
FAB Tools Shortcut Menu
If you should need to deactivate the Autopilot, note that you can select FAB Tools from the Plugin menu as seen in this screenshot. There is also an option to Deactivate Autopilot in the Shortcut menu, so you don’t have to open the plugin to turn it off. If you do select FAB Tools while the Photoshop welcome screen is displayed, Photoshop will open and the plugin will be displayed, enabling you to change the settings or deactivate Autopilot.
We strongly recommend working on copies of your images when working in Autopilot mode. We’ve tried very hard to make it as robust as possible, but occasionally errors may occur, especially if you are using a short pause, and if you have Automatic Save & Close turned on, you may end up saving errors and need to rerun a file or two. Ideally, run through a few batches without Save & Close turned on first to get a feel for how Autopilot works, and find a good place for the pause radio buttons. Then, once you strike a good balance, you can turn on Save & Close and blast through large batches of images relatively quickly.
Inactivity Timer
Because Photoshop will revert to its welcome screen when all files are processed, there is an inactivity timer built into Autopilot to help you avoid forgetting that the Pilot is on, and inadvertently framing and saving a file that you open in Photoshop. The default timer is five minutes, but you can change this to up to one hour with the available radio buttons. Note too that the inactivity timer resets every time you process an image, so five minutes is generally fine.
Round-Robin Processing
A longer inactivity timer may be useful if you are working on images in another program, and want to round-robin to Photoshop. For example, you can leave Autopilot turned on in Photoshop, and even minimize the FAB Tools plugin window to an icon, and then send your images to Photoshop, and they will be automatically processed and saved back into your base application.
Presets Module
You can save any and all settings in presets and recall them at any time. When you save a Preset you can select which of the four main modules to include, and even if you save them all, you can deselect any module when restoring, giving you full control of what you include and restore. You can even restore deleted watermarks!
Tools Module
Tools Module
The final panel provides a number of tools to help you maximize your use of the MBP Fine Art Border Tools plugin.
At the very top, you’ll find a button that links to this page, the FAB Tools User Manual. Below that is a group of Global Settings. There are a few operations that may require clarification so contextual tips appear when you perform certain tasks. If you don’t want these Quick Tips to appear, uncheck the Show Quick Tips checkbox.
The Custom Fonts First checkbox is used to reorder the many available Media Formats under the Format dropdown list in the Print Frame module so that the Custom Formats appear at the top of the list. Unchecking this checkbox makes the Custom Formats appear after the non-customizable Media Formats.
The Enable Safety Nudge checkbox is on by default and essentially ensures the positioning of watermarks and text that you can add to your image are calculated so that they are positioned in the same place regardless of the image orientation. Without this checkbox on, you may find that in some situations your watermarks and text are higher or lower compared to the frame or inner image edges when applied to portrait orientation images compared to landscape orientation images.
Use the Show Settings Folder Path button if you need to make a backup of your settings, or if you have a problem with FAB Tools and are requested to send your settings files to support.
Click on Show Reset Buttons to display multiple buttons that erase any settings you’ve made and restore factory presets if you have any problems with FAB Tools. There are buttons for each module and to reset the Custom Media Formats. There is also a red button to Completely Reset FAB Tools, which resets everything with one click. If you have to use this, we also recommend clicking on the hamburger icon in the top right corner of the FAB Tools panel and selecting Reload the Plugin.
There is a button to Subscribe to Update Notifications so that you receive an email from us when an important or useful update is released, and at the bottom of the Tools module, you’ll find the version of the plugin and the media version, which we may ask you to check or provide to us if you should require technical support at any time.
Technical Support
If you can’t find the answers you need on this page, or if you have any suggestions for future updates, please feel free to contact us with the provided contact form.
A month after I talked about adding text-based watermarks and the Autopilot feature to the MBP Fine Art Border Tools plugin for Adobe Photoshop, today, I’m proud to announce three more new features that pretty much round out the majority of all the ideas I originally had for FAB Tools. There will doubtlessly be a few more incremental updates, but those of you that are completely uninterested in this product will be pleased to hear that we’re pretty much done with these updates for now and will be returning to regular episodes from next week.
Having said that, the Martin Bailey Photography Podcast has always been about sharing what I’m up to, and this is the result of another month of hard work at the computer, so I’m really just continuing to share what I’m up to. Besides, I’m really proud of what I’ve created here, and from the sales reports, I know that there is a percentage of you that agree with me.
Another thing that I’ve been really happy about is that users and potential owners have been key in driving these latest three features, all of which were on my list, but I honestly didn’t think two of these were even possible with the current Photoshop plugin framework. Not wanting to disappoint people though, when these features came up, it prompted me to take a deeper dive, and come up with some innovative ways to build what people want, so let’s jump in and talk about them.
So, the first feature which is a new Presets module is available right now, as it was actually released a week ago version 1.2.0 and has already passed Adobe’s review. The second two features which are the ability to change the color of the frames and automatic text from your image data are still in review but should be available within the next few days. The Presets module enables you to store and recall all of the settings in the four main modules, including the new features that I’m adding. There are checkboxes to initially select which modules you want to include in your Preset, and when you restore a preset, you can deselect modules if you only want to restore a particular module.
So, for example, say you’ve set up a Web Frame with a specifically sized border, and vertical offset, and perhaps also added a graphic watermark as well as a text-based watermark, you can now go to the Preset panel and save all of these settings in a single preset, so the next time you want to apply the same settings, you don’t have to try to remember or keep notes of what you did. It’s all restored from the preset file with two clicks. The first click to select your preset, and the second to restore it.
Here is a series of screenshots to illustrate this. As you can see on the left, you can give your preset a short name that appears in the Select a Preset pulldown list once added, and there is a longer Preset Description field that you can use to make notes about the preset, as you can see I did in the middle screenshot. When you first go to the Presets screen and there are no other presets saved, you will automatically be asked to create your first preset. Once you have a preset saved, you can select it from the Pulldown, as you can see in the third screenshot.
Saving a Preset
Note too that the preset that you create will be marked with an asterisk in the list to show that it’s based on the current settings. In this state, if you make any changes to your settings you can simply hit the Update button to automatically update the preset with your current settings. The same goes for a restored preset. If you need to change any preset previously saved, just hit the Restore button, and make your changes, then hit Update to save them. And of course, if you just want to restore a preset for use, the Restore button will do that. You can also see the Included Modules checkboxes there too, which enables you to decide which modules to include, and which to restore. If you only want the settings for a specific module, you can deselect the others, when saving and restoring a preset.
Also note that if you include a Text Watermark that you delete after saving your preset, it will also be restored along with your preset. The same goes for graphic-based watermarks as long as you are on the same computer. If you copy your settings to a different computer, you can still restore your settings and presets, but you will have to delete the graphical watermark from the Watermarks page and relink it because the token that Photoshop creates will be different. Apart from that though, the settings are transferable if you work on multiple computers. There is a link to the settings folder in the Tools module if you need to do that.
Print Frame Presets
As I use FAB Tools in my own photography, especially with the addition of color settings that we’ll look at shortly, I’ve found the presets very useful for recreating the same style of frame. I’ve also been positioning the FAB Tools logo as I created some of the new marketing graphics, and being able to save the precise positioning of the watermarks has been incredibly valuable and time-saving too. Another area that is greatly improved through the presets is the creation of print frames.
As an example, here is a print frame I added to an image, and made a few changes to a Custom A3 media format, and adjusted the Border Offset both for better visual balance and to make room for the image title, which, by the way, was automatically populated from the information embedded in the image file using the new Auto-Text feature which we’ll also look at in more detail shortly. If you need to recreate these frame proportions and offset again later, you can now simply save a preset with a name that you’ll recognize and include a description so that you know what you’re going to restore, and you can then recall these settings at any time in the future. Even if you change the Custom A3 media these exact settings will be restored along with your other settings, making the plugin much more useful.
Print Frame Poppy Heaven
Color Your Frame!
So, as you’ve seen, we can now change the color of the frame that you apply to both Web and Print Frames. Say, for example, you want to frame an image and move away from the standard white frame that we’ve had so far, all you have to do is open your image and click on the colored square on the left of the two which is the Border color, and you can select a color using the regular Photoshop color patches and sliders, but your mouse pointer will change to a picker so you can also sample any color your want from your image, as you see in this screenshot.
Sampling Frame Colors
Here is a Web Frame with different colors sampled to illustrate a different point. If you look to the right of the Border color picker in the previous screenshot, you’ll also see a second color picker for the Stroke color. Until now, the outer stroke which is added to images has used the secondary or background color in Photoshop, but some people found this confusing, and even I forgot to change the color a few times, so I took this opportunity to take control of that, in two further steps. To begin with, you can now select the Stroke color using this color picker, but because we can now change the color of the main border, I figured we might need a way to separate the border from the image, and so there is now a checkbox below the new color pickers that enables a 1-pixel stroke between the resized image and its border, which uses the color you selected.
Namibia Dunes
The second checkbox is to decide whether or not you want to add an outer stroke, and there is a third checkbox to simply use a mid-grey for the outer stroke, as you may not need it to be the same color as your inner stroke. In this example image, I selected the bright orange as a highlight color, and you can see it more distinctly along the bottom and left edges, where the darker areas of the image are. It’s very subtle, and I toyed with the idea of enabling the user to selected a larger border, but it looked very tacky, so I used my own design sense to keep this simple. You can also see that I selected the grey stroke color for the outer stroke, although a second bright orange stroke didn’t look too bad either.
Use Cases
Before we move on to the Auto-Text Feature, I wanted to share a couple of use cases for these colored borders, so that you can understand my thinking behind this. First of all, I simply think that it can extend the control you have over your work as an artist. I have always thought of Fine Art Borders as being mainly white, and in most fine art circles that is probably still the case, but as we know, there are no hard and fast rules in art, and I know that a wide variety of creatives are starting to use FAB Tools in their work, and for the sake of a few additional controls, it was possible to extend the usability of the product. I have found it to be a lot of fun and an additional creative release to be able to easily change the color of my frames like this, and I’ll provide more examples as we move through the rest of this post. So the first use case is to extend the possibilities for an adventurous creative.
The second use case is a real-world use case from the person that asked about changing the color of the border, and that was someone that works as a bulk-shooter, that had been requested to provide over a hundred photos of school students with a navy blue border, I imagine to match the schools official color. Unfortunately this time around they had to manually change the color because they had a deadline, but in the future, they’ll be able to process the images in bulk with just a few clicks. Note too that if you have a specific color with an RGB Hex code, you can simply enter or copy and paste that code into the field to the right of each color picker, and know that you have the exact color you need in place. You can also paste your code into the Photoshop color picker that opens when you click the colored square, but be sure to stay in RGB color mode, as the colors will get messed up if you switch to a different color mode. Unfortunately, there is currently no way to programmatically stop you from doing that, so please just be careful not to change it.
Auto-Text is Here!
OK, so let’s move on to the final new feature in these two recent releases, and that is Automatic Text! I’d already finished this feature when the request for colored borders came in, but to extend the school photo use case a little here, if you do similar event shooting and need to add, for example, the name of the person in each shot, you can now add that name or whatever information you need to, into the Caption or Description field of your photo, and with Automatic Text turned on in the Add Text module, you can now add that in your chosen font completely automatically. This will enable the school photo shooter that contacted me to fulfill a request that they had received to add student’s names to each photo, but they had to refuse because it would have been too much work. With Automated Text and Batch Processing via Autopilot, you could process a hundred photos with a colored frame and the names of each student completely automatically with a few clicks, and we’d be talking just two to three minutes to process the images. Of course, you would need to add the names to the photos manually, but that is much quicker than registering a new text watermark for every photo.
As an example, let’s throw everything we’ve got at my photo of the beautiful Kegon Falls in the Nikko area of Japan. I love the early summer fresh greens in this photo, so let’s play with them a little. To start with, I’ve selected a darker green, sampled from the photo, as the main border color. This, I feel, helps to give the final piece some added depth, as we look through the deeper green at the lighter greens in the actual image. To compliment that though, I selected a fresher light green for the inner stroke, and I’ve left that green active for the outer stroke too, rather than making that a mid-grey.
In the Watermark module, I selected an adapted version of the logo I’m using to market FAB Tools and opted to add it to the bottom left corner, and nudged it up by 8.8% and to the left by 0.5%. Without any nudging, the logo would sit perfectly aligned to the bottom of the inner frame, but I wanted to adjust it so that the top half of the logo overlaps with the image, and moving it to the left just a half a percent makes the foot of my kneeling man overlap with the bottom of the left side stroke.
In the Add Text module, I first added a watermark and selected a font from the pulldown. Note that currently, it is not possible to use just any font installed in Photoshop or on your computer. The fonts in the pulldown list need to present on your computer, but unfortunately, at this point, you are limited to the 17 fonts I’ve registered for use. If there are any other fonts that you believe are available by default that you would like me to add, please let me know. Here’s a screenshot to illustrate this process.
Adding Everything!
Note that I’ve made it possible to drag the plugin panel out very wide now so that you can make the most of the new Preview that I’ve included for the new Automatic Text. I’ve left the font options visible here too so that you can see that, but generally, once you’ve added your text string and selected your font and styling, you can click Done and then the Hide Options button to reduce those options down to just the text pulldown list.
Below the font settings are the new Automatic Text settings. There is a lot in here, especially when the window isn’t so wide, because the various data checkboxes are wrapped to two or three lines. Still, I’ve tried to be inventive and keep the options to a minimum while still providing adequate usability. For example, in addition to simply turning the Automatic Text on and off, there is a third option to leave the Text active but hide all of the options. The same goes for the preview box. If you don’t need that, there is a Hide this preview checkbox, so you can collapse all of this down to just two lines when you are not using it.
We are using most of it right now though, so take a look at the options we have. Firstly, let me explain the Replace and Append options. The Replace option simply replaces the text that you entered when you created this particular text watermark. These options are not tied to the saved watermark text as such, but they use the font that is saved with the text, so if you intend to override the text with the Replace or Replace Split options, you can simply use the text as a label remember your font settings by. The difference between Replace and Replace Split is that the Split option breaks down the text into two or three lines. If you look to the right of the checkbox that says Caption, there is a carriage return symbol. This adds a carriage return after the Caption if you need to do that. The next two lines that you see in this preview are wrapped intelligently based on the length of the Caption or your Text Watermark if you choose the Append or Append Split options.
The Append and Append Split options work in exactly the same way, but the text is appended to your watermark text, so in this example, the first line would be Martin Bailey Photography K.K. because that’s what I added as my watermark text. That though, along with the options you select, is all that is saved in the plugin. The rest of the text is all information that is embedded in the image and placed here automatically when you open an image. Then there are the Spacer options. This is the character or characters used between each item in the list of shooting information. If you do not choose one of the Split options and simply Replace or Append, all information will be in one or two long lines with the Separator between every element.
The final option to Flip text left & right alignment on the applied border is a workaround to overcome a problem with Photoshop. If you use the World-Ready Layout under the Photoshop > Type preferences, when you apply your text watermark, the left and right alignment for the left and right sides will be reversed. So, say you have your text on the right side, it would be left-aligned, not right-aligned. That may be a valid requirement so I’m happy to leave this here, but generally, this is to overcome what I consider to be a problem for anyone that uses World-Ready Layout. Another problem related to this is if you do use World-Ready Layout and you have a period at the end of your watermark text, that period will be mysteriously moved to the beginning of the sentence. I could fix this with code, but first I’m going to see if this is a bug in Photoshop and I’ll update my code later if it is not. Should you fall foul of that problem though, unfortunately, the only way to overcome that at the moment is to select the Latin and East Asian Layout rather than World-Ready.
Photoshop Text Engine Options
The final option at the bottom of the Automatic Text area is the option to select either the Web Frame border color or the Print Frame border color for use in your preview. This preview and its related options are actually also now used for the regular Text Watermark so you can make use of this even if you are not using Automatic Text, to check what your text will look like before applying it to your image. So that you can see what this all looks like in a resized and framed image though, here is the output photo using the settings that we just covered.
The Kegon Falls
Note that the width of the automatic text is governed by the Scale setting for your text. In the above screenshot, I had it set to 35 but changed it to 42 for the final frame to increase the size of the text a little bit more. I use Scale as a percentage of the width of the image to create maximum flexibility when changing sizes. For example, for my eBook that accompanies these posts for paying MBP Pro Members, I needed a much higher resolution image, so I simply doubled the size and the watermarks remained perfectly positioned as you see here. It also helps when we process square or portrait orientation images, allowing the watermarks to resize as necessary.
Photoshop File Info Description
Note too that while you are getting your scaling and positioning locked down, I find it useful to apply the frame and watermarks all from the Watermark or Add Text modules, by right-clicking the shortcut menu at the top right corner of the plugin panel. In there you’ll find an Apply Web Border and Apply Fine Art Border option, among others, so if you want to make a quick change, just hit the Revert button under the Actions section at the bottom of the plugin, and use the shortcut menu to apply the frame again. Of course, you need to have the Add Watermark or Add Text checkboxes checked under the Framing module to automatically apply everything you want, but it’s quicker than going back to the Framing module every time you want to make a change.
One last thing that I wanted to mention about the Automatic Text feature is that in general, you will probably be entering your text in your content management or image editing software. I enter all of my descriptions and keywords etc. in Capture One Pro, but you could do the same in Lightroom or pretty much any other similar program. If however, you come to add some text to your image in Photoshop and realize that you don’t have any caption text entered, you can select File Info from the Photoshop File menu and enter whatever you want to embed into the border into the Description field.
Note that the Title fields are not used. I can’t get them from the document information, so this must go into the Description field to be picked up. In Capture One Pro, I add this information to the Description field under IPTC – Content in the Metadata panel, so you may have to experiment a little to find out where to add this in your base editing program. Here is a screenshot of where you can add it in Photoshop though, where I added the words “The Kegon Falls”. Note too that I will probably change the word Caption to Description in a future update because it seems more programs are using the word Description. Also note that if you do update this information in Photoshop, you have to save and close then reopen your image for the change to be picked up.
Under the Hood
In addition to the visible changes that I’ve mentioned today, I’ve actually completely rebuild some of the core functions in the MBP Fine Art Border Tools for this release, to keep it ticking along nicely as I increase my demands on its performance. These have actually made things so much quicker that I added a quarter of a second pause option to the Autopilot mode, and I found that also my four-year-old Mac Book Pro used to need 1 or 2 seconds between actions, it will now run in batch with just a quarter of a second pause, so if you are processing in batch mode, you will see big improvements in performance so give it a try.
Note too that considering all the work that I’ve put into developing FAB Tools over the last five months, and considering that there is now more than four times the number of features in my initial release, I’ve decided to increase the price from $26 to $36. I believe that even $36 is not a lot of money for everything that you now get in FAB Tools. Also note that the price increase is tied to the Adobe Review of the latest version, so if you listen to this on or shortly after Sept 16 2021 you may still be able to buy FAB Tools for $26, but failing that, I hope you agree that $36 is still a fair price. Either way, you can check out the plugin on the Adobe Exchange Marketplace here and if you want to check the current feature set much into the future, you can check that out on the product page here.
Sales of my new Fine Art Border Tools plugin for Adobe Photoshop are picking up, so a quick thank you to any of you that already bought the plugin. I’ve invested more time to implement a few new features one of which I had planned to do from the start, and some others which were a bit of an afterthought but have in many ways stolen the limelight, as I’ll explain in this episode. I wanted to gauge interest before investing another month or so of development time into implementing Text-Based Watermarks. The graphical Watermarks were added in my first release, and in a follow-up release shortly after that, I added the ability to store multiple Watermark files making that feature much more useful.
Autopilot for FAB Tools
The second thing that I added as an after-thought is incredibly cool, and I will share more details in a tutorial a video very soon too, but I was about to submit the plugin for review ten days ago when a thought bubble popped into my mind with pretty much the entire mechanism to implement what I’ve called Autopilot. Then, over this last weekend, I figured out how to make the batch processing even more robust, so I’ve literally just submitted another new build, which includes more robust batch processing. As you can probably imagine, Autopilot takes control of FAB Tools, so you will be able to perform either a Web Frame or Print Frame resize with your fine art frame, and if you turn on the checkboxes, you can automatically add your graphical and new text-based watermarks, completely automatically. Please allow me to explain in more detail.
With Autopilot active, all images that you have open in Photoshop will be processed according to your settings. In the past, batch processing has been in the form of opening many documents at the same time and hoping that you had enough system resources for Photoshop to work with possibly many gigabytes of images open, then you had to click the Apply button and wait for each image to be processed. The Automatic Save & Close button and checkboxes for adding the watermark automatically helped, but with no support for Actions with these plugins in Photoshop, it was a manual process to select each image.
I realized though that I can detect when your image closes, especially when Automatic Save & Close is turned on because FAB Tools is issuing the command, so I figured that I would just wait for the next image to be selected, and kick off the processing again automatically. It sounds easy and was actually a relatively difficult task to program this into the already very complex code, but it was possible. I then had another thought bubble and figured out how to open multiple files in batch mode, so if you want to process more files than you can realistically open in Photoshop simultaneously, simply use the Open button with Autopilot turned on, and it will batch process your images, opening them one at a time, processing your resize, frame and watermarks, and then save and close it before opening the next image that you selected in your initial Open. I’m going to wait for Adobe to release my current build before uploading another update that I’ve just finished, but once you get to version 1.1.7 you will also notice that the Open button turns blue to attract your attention when Autopilot is active and the Open button label changes from Open to Batch Open, to make this all more obvious.
Autopilot Batch Processing
Also, note that because there is a lot of text on the Autopilot screen, I’ve added a Hide Instructions button which removes the five paragraphs of text when pressed, and your selection is saved, so you won’t need to press this every time you start using Autopilot. The instructions are turned on to begin with though, to help you avoid inadvertently processing something.
Benchmark Tests
I’ve done some benchmark tests and found that on my powerful 8-core CPU iMac Pro, with Autopilot active I can open around 20 TIFF files at once before Photoshop starts to complain that there are too many tasks running in FAB Tools. Because they all open together though, for small batches, this is slightly faster than my new batch processing, due to the overhead of opening and closing all the files individually. I was able to process 20 TIFFs, a total of 2.79 GB of data, and saved them as large B2 media size print files in two minutes and 10 seconds. The same 20 files in batch mode took 20 seconds longer, so there is a 15% overhead. You have no choice if you want to process more than 20 files at once though because the system won’t handle too many files.
I then tried a batch of 100 TIFF files, for a total of 18 GB, and saved them as Web-sized framed and watermarked both with graphic and text-based watermarks and with the new batch mode, which took 10 minutes and 47 seconds. For all of my tests, I was using the 0.5-second pause to prevent errors, but I have found that even on my 13″ Mac Book Pro, with the new batch mode I am not getting any errors even when using the 1-second pause, so this has improved the number of files that can be processed and the stability, so it was a weekend well spent on the updated batch mechanism.
You can mix and match as well. For example, say you start working on a batch of images that you have FAB Tools open via the Batch Open button the intelligent batch mode, and then you want to process another 10 files. You can set your larger batch running, and gather your next ten images while the batch runs, and then once it’s finished, drag and drop your new 10 images to Photoshop. As long as Autopilot is active, it will automatically switch between batch modes without you having to change anything.
If you leave Automatic Save & Close turned off, the images will process and sit waiting for your review, and if all’s well, you can hit the Save/Close button to do just that. If you want to make a change, you can change your settings with Autopilot active and then hit the Revert button to remove your first frame and watermarks, and Autopilot will instantly reapply the frame with your new settings. Once you are happy with your settings, you can turn on that Automatic Save & Close button, and any other images you open while Autopilot is active will be automatically processed. Please do work on copies of your images, especially as you experiment, because they will be overwritten if Save and Close is active.
Round-Robin Processing
Because Autopilot will just sit and wait for images though, you can use it to Round-Robin from programs like Capture One Pro or Lightroom to add your frames and watermarks very efficiently. I figured this would be more impressive to watch so I created a three-minute video to share how easy it is to Round-Robin from Lightroom and Capture One Pro, which you can find below, but I’ll also explain a little more about the Autopilot feature. Say you’re working on an image that you want to prepare for print with a border, or you’re working on some images to upload to Instagram and you want to resize, add a square frame, and watermark them ready, you can simply locate your images, select edit in Photoshop if it’s available, ensure that you make a copy of your image during the edit or export command, and then when it hits Photoshop your frame will be automatically applied and saved, then appear back in your based program a few moments later.
I’ll work on a longer video to fully explain these new features over the next few days, and embed that below as well, so please check back later if it’s not already here when you visit.
As I worked with the new Autopilot mode myself, I did find that I would occasionally forget that it was still active, even though there is an inactivity timer that automatically turns it off, and I opened a file that I didn’t intend to frame and resize, so I have also just added an Auto-off mode in addition to the Inactivity timers. The options are there so you’ll figure out the best way to work, but if you know you’re processing a one-off image or batch then select the Auto-off option and Autopilot will still wait three minutes for your images, before deactivating, but after you’ve sent something to be processed, be it a single image or a batch, after completing the processing, Autopilot will automatically deactivate.
FAB Tools Shortcut Menu
Also, I found it useful to open the Photoshop Preferences General tab and uncheck Auto show the Home Screen checkbox. With that checked, Photoshop will always go back to the home screen, hiding your plugins when there are no images open. If you prefer to leave the Home Screen turned on, you can go to the Plugins menu and turn on FAB Tools under MBP Fine Art Border Tools to display the plugin, even from the Home Screen.
FAB Tools Fonts
You can also select Deactivate Autopilot from there too if you have a longer timer set but need to open an image that you don’t want to process before the Inactivity timer expires. If you turn off the Home Screen, when you open Photoshop you’ll just see any open Plugins or panels you have open and this makes it more intuitive to use the new FAB Tools Autopilot, especially when round-robin-ing. Is that a word?
One thing that you do need to keep in mind is that I was not able to prevent you from opening new images while Autopilot is processing other images, and most of the time during my tests, if you do open an image while Autopilot is working, it will result in a bit of a mess. If things go wrong, I try to deactivate Autopilot and provide a message to let you know that things went wrong, but depending on the timing, an image might get saved with errors before we realize that something is wrong, so please try to avoid opening new images while Autopilot is working on other images.
Text-Based Watermarks
OK, so let’s take a look at the new Text-Based Watermarks in a little more detail too. Based on the same layout the new Add Text module looks very similar to the first Watermarks module, but in addition to simply storing multiple text strings for placement on your image or in its new border, there is a selection of 17 fonts, most of which will be available on your system already, and I also store the font style, like Regular and Bold, etc. and the color that you select for your text, as you can see in this screenshot.
I’ve left the Text options open in this screenshot for you to take a look at, but as you can see, there is a lot on that panel, so when you’ve finished adding or modifying your watermark text, hit the Done button, and all of the text options will collapse away leaving just the Show Options button, which says Hide Options in this screenshot, and the pulldown with the text inside. If you don’t need to change any settings, you can simply select any of the stored text watermarks from that pulldown without displaying all the settings.
Text Watermarks
Note too that we don’t use points for the font size because that would mean you’d need to change the size in points every time you change the size of your resized image. Instead, as with the graphical watermarks, we use a Scale value, which I’ve set to 30 by default, although you can obviously change that, and this intelligently scales your text to 30% of the width of your image, regardless of the size your image will be resized to. I also fixed a problem with the opacity, which of course, sets the opacity of your image between 0 and 100%. All of these settings are stored on a per string basis, so when you change to a different text string, all of its settings come with it.
Due to limitations in the plugin framework, I’m currently not able to simply access all of the fonts on the users’ system, and there is no way for me to know if the fonts I’ve listed are actually installed, so if you select a font and it looks bland when applied, check that you have the font installed, and if you don’t, install it, and it should kick-in just fine. Also, if there are any fonts that you believe are installed by default that you would like to add, please let me know, and I’ll try to add them in a future update. Similarly, if you use a font in a language that is not covered by these default fonts, let me know, and I’ll figure out a way to make additional font sets available for other languages, etc.
I have also tested that a certain amount of intelligence ensures that if, for example, I store some Japanese text as a watermark, even though I have a Western font assigned, Photoshop realizes that it’s Japanese text and uses a default Japanese font, rather than applying garbled characters. I would like more control over this, so I’ve got a note to work on a solution, but for now, if you do need to use non-Western text, FAB Tools should at least not fall flat on its face.
Japanese Watermarks
For this example, I applied both my Text and Graphical watermarks inside the resized image, as opposed to in the border, so I made the outer border a bit smaller, and also reduced the opacity of my name stamp to 50%, to make it look more like it has actually been stamped over a dark background. Even with the generic Japanese font to display my company name, it doesn’t look too bad, although some options at some point soon will be nice.
Here is the overview video that I mentioned earlier. I hope you find it useful!
OK, so that’s a quick rundown of these new features for MBP Fine Art Border Tools which have now passed Adobe’s review, so these features will be in FAB Tools when you buy it. For more information on all of the features available, check out the product page, and if you just want to run off and pick up a copy, you can find the plugin in the Adobe Exchange Marketplace. Make sure that you use the same email address as your Adobe ID when checking out, to ensure that your plugin is delivered to your account. Note too that you need to be running Photoshop version 22 or higher to use the MBP Fine Art Border Tools.
Tag FAB Tools!
If you are finding FAB Tools useful and use it on any of the images that you post on Instagram, tag your image with the hashtag #mbpfabtools and I’ll keep my eye out for anything you post. I’d love to see how you are using FAB Tools.
