Every now and then something new reaches the market that was designed for a specific purpose, but also leaves room for other possibilities. Pro Templates is such a product. I was working on a video production for a client who comes in every year and has me produce an updated version of his Senior Portraits Promotion. He is a professional photographer who specializes in High School Senior Portraits and has had great success with his promotional video, which he plays at high schools and at booths set up during school promotions and for special promotions held in shopping malls.

As we were putting together a new version of his promotional video, he casually confided that he was backing out of the photography business in order to pursue a new line of work�.. Software development. Naturally I was curious so I asked him about it. It seems that during the time he was working with Adobe PhotoShop and manipulating his images for clients that he started developing his own custom templates. This made it easier to just "slip in" a new image and make text changes, etc. PhotoShop is excellent for these types of redundant photography chores due to its multi-layering capabilities. In the course of archiving his rapidly growing template collection it occurred to him that perhaps other photographers who were NOT so well versed in the ways of PhotoShop might also find the concept of custom templates intriguing. So once he had amassed enough templates for a collection he organized them into categories and burned the collections onto CD-ROM. Then he began advertising the collection to other photographers, and so far the interest in his product has been very encouraging.

So just exactly what are Pro Templates and how can you use them?

Pro Templates are an easy to use application plug-in for PhotoShop (versions 4, 5, 5.5 and LE 5.0) that lets you make custom projects in SECONDS rather than hours. Pro Templates, designed by Stover Digital Services, are easy to use and require no prior knowledge of PhotoShop and work in either Mac or PC. Each template is layered, allowing you a virtually endless amount of possibilities. At this time there are 11 sets available (over 200 templates) on CD-ROM, and developer Verlon Stover is hard at work on the next series of sets.

There are sets designed for Composites, High School Senior Photos, Wedding Photographers, Sports, Internet cards and letters, Holiday Cards, and more. Some sets, like the "Curves" CD collection and "pHOTO rocks V1" CD are specialty templates that cover a variety of situations. Prices for the sets vary depending on number of templates and size/complexity of the collection, but range from $95 to $250. You can even "roll your own" set and have Stover Digital custom create a set specifically for you.

Here's how they work: Place a Pro Templates CD-ROM in your drive. Find the template that you want to use and load it into PhotoShop. Next load the image you want to insert into the template. Choose "Select" and "All". This will give you the "marching ants" around your image. Now go to "Edit" and select "Copy" (or use Left/Ctrl/"C" on the PC). Are you with me so far? Good. Now go the template, find the layers palette and highlight (click on) the "paste into" layer you want to paste your image into. While holding the Control key (PC) or command key (Mac) - left click on the "paste into" layer. Now, simply go to the "Edit" task bar and click on "paste into". Your image is now in the template. You may move it around or resize it any way you like. For some templates you may need to change the image's perspective, which is also very easy to do. If there is text included, like a name, it is so simple to just go to the layers palette and select the name layer and change the text and even the text font and color. And that's all there is to it. I am certainly no expert in PhotoShop, but this is almost TOO easy! And guess what? You get an instructional video with each purchase of Pro Templates, which literally shows you, step by step, how to utilize Pro Templates. I learned all I needed to know in fifteen minutes and was churning out some excellent composite photographs.

But wait! There's more! Remember at the beginning of this review that I mentioned "�something new reaches the market that was designed for a specific purpose, but also leaves room for other possibilities"? Well, here's where the "other possibilities" comes in. It occurred to me that if you could insert images in these templates, why not graphics, more text, or even logos? Why not use these templates to create some very fancy and professional looking CG pages? Instead of an image I tried inserting a client's logo and it looked super. Then all I had to do was export it over to the Toaster to use in a video job. I know there are many ways to do this, but for me the quick and dirty method was to simply save the image files as an IFF, take them to the Amiga, load them into LightWave one at a time and placed them as a background image. I then rendered it to a Framestore, then using OzWare's FastFrames I turned them all into Flyer Stills. The results were absolutely fantastic and the entire process took me less time than creating a similar page with the same "Wow Factor" using Toaster CG or AlphaPaint.

Pro Templates are available from Tallyn's Professional Photographic, Peoria, IL (1-800-433-8685), or you can visit the Pro Templates website for complete descriptions, pricing, and lots of examples at http://www.protemplates.com

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