Filter Forge Beta Updated

Filter Forge, Inc. has released the first major update to the beta version of Filter Forge, a Photoshop plugin that allows users to create their own procedural seamless textures with normal, bump and specular maps in a visual node-based editor. The update fixes a number of problems, adds new features and significantly improves the rendering speed. The public beta version of Filter Forge is available at Filterforge.com upon registration and approval. The focus of this update is speed — due to extensive optimizations, Filter Forge’s rendering is now considerably faster (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, four new blending modes for the Blend component, 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. The full list of updates, additions and fixes can be found at http://www.filterforge.com/more/news/966.html.