Installation of plugins in volume 4

Locate the plugin or plug-in folder of your favourite application (for Photoshop this is plug-ins, for PSP it is plugins). I would recommend setting up a third party folder or perhaps an Abneil folder within the plugins folder to hold the plugins

Copy the plugins into the plugin folder (plug-ins). The plugins can also be placed in other applications such as PSP or Painter

Startup Photoshop and access the plugins in the filter menu. You will find them in the AP [categories] such as AP blurs and others. Why do it this way?? Well, most people purchase the entire collection of 190 or so plugins and then they just see a list of AP vol 1, 2, etc.. By dividing them into categories, it is easy to find the plugin you require. Volume 4 is particularly bad atspreading the plugins across multiple categories

Fireup plugin and use. The plugin dialog is generally consistent across all plugin sets (though this is always changing!). The top half of the dialog is the general sliders (some of the sliders are hidden and will be revealed only by clicking the advanced button). The bottom half of the dialog has the same sort of controls from plugin to plugin. The blend dropdown has about 70 odd options for the output of the plugin effect, so instead of the basic effect, the effect can be inverted / tiled / color wraped etc. Additional to the output, the plugins all have effects modes and these are more processor intensive commands such as using the default effect output to create a blur of the original image or a smear or sepia effect (the output options are applied after the effect mode but before the color sliders - the red and green and blue sliders to the right of the blend modes). The color slider value is added to the output to redden or turn an image blue. The effect dropdown also has a controlling factor beneath the dropdown (set by default to 100) and this needs to be adjusted depending on the effect mode set.

Additional buttons include open preset / save preset / reset / advanced. Open presets opens existing preset files. Save preset saves all the current settings. Reset resets everything to the default setting. Advanced displays all the sliders etc available. The next row contains the zoom buttons and these relate to the preview. The bottom row contains the final buttons and these are used for experimentation, such as setting the effect to the extremes or random settings or subtle tweaks or running through the different blend modes