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While a lot of interest and excitement is now focused on the awesome capabilities of new editing plug-ins for Aperture, particularly with the recent introduction of Apple's Dodge & Burn, DFT's Power Stroke, Ozone and Lights!, as well as Tiffen's amazing collection of filters in the Dfx Digital Filter Suite, many might have overlooked that a lot of the old export plug-ins for Aperture are getting an upgrade. One export plug-ins recently updated and upgraded is Reinhard Uebel's Aperture BorderFX.

Aperture BorderFX is a unique plug-in that allows you to add border, as well as text, copyright notice and watermark, when exporting an image. The latest version, which is now at 1.1 and is fully compatible with Aperture 2.1, includes added functionalities.

You can do almost all common tasks associated with creating a frame or border using the Aperture BorderFX. The features of the previous version, as well as the added features of the current version, are all designed to allow the easy and quick creation of straight edge or rounded-corner border styles with a certain degree of flexibility.

You can do many things to a selected image as you prepare to export it with a border. Among them includes image scaling, horizontal or vertical flipping, adding a drop shadow, applying sharpening, re-framing the image, cropping the photo, including title and copyright texts, and drawing a watermark. These features will help you create stylish borders beginning with the basic black. You can then add to it or modify it with strokes, rounded corners, translucent edges, dropped shadows, desaturated frames, letterboxed lines, lines of photo titles and captions, transparent watermarks, and so on.

In addition, you can create your own border presets, and, then export the images in a number of supported formats from JPEG to PNG and TIFF. When you export, you can include both the EXIF and IPTC metadata, including keywords, in the exported files.

This is all well and good. However, Aperture BorderFX does not yet include the more fancy and themed "rough border edges" such as photographic edges simulating that of various 135mm film strips, 120mm medium format transparencies, and large-format films, as well as frames that shows brushed, perforated cut, and burnt edges. This feature, however, may likely be introduced in future editions via image-masking.

While this is something we can hope to expect in the near future, meanwhile, the current straight and rounded-edge black boarders with line, translucent, shadowed and desaturated variations, are great additions that can set off your images and make them stand out, without the need for round-tripping to a full-blown editing software.

If I were to rate this plug-in, I'd give it a 4 out of 5. Knowing that I can easily and quickly add borders and lines from within Aperture when I need is always a good thing. And because it's free (although donations to fund the continued development of this plug-in are accepted via PayPal), there's no reason why Aperture BorderFX should not be installed in everyone's Aperture.

Download Aperture BorderFX now from Apple's Aperture Download page, and from Reinhard Eubel's Aperture BorderFX official website.

[Note: Photo in screenshot by Dominique James of The Studio and The Playground. Copyright © 2008. All rights reserved.]