Demo Extensions.....

***cough***

C'mon guys, this is a damn good idea, eh???

True..... .....and why not go public with it, advertise it, and use it to their advantage to bring in more authors and improve submissions.....especially when they are already allowing it, eh???

***cough, cough, coughity cough-cough*** LOL.....

StevieJ,

Maybe you should take the hint that it's not that great of an idea and not bump the thread 3 times. At best, after 4 days you got an "eh" and a tentative looking "yes".

Regarding the topic at hand:

I'm in the camp that thinks a no-day-limit watermarking PLE is a great idea. Mix that with a demo that only allows you to render 10 images before it reverts to PLE mode and throws a watermark on things and I think we have a winner.

I thought this was a great idea, suggested it via the contact form and the folks at FilterForge let me down politely saying they want to do things their way. And hey, they have every right to do so. While the forum is an appropriate place to suggest ideas such as these, after a couple of days with no community action you're more likely to get a response that means something through other channels.

A PLE would not be limited in any way Amethyst, it would just watermark all of the image renders. This helps things overall because if a user needs just a few renders from one filter they will buy the cheapy $10 one instead of just downloading the demo and using it for free.

If the user wants to spend the time to learn the program and attempt to get a free version a PLE gives them unlimited time to do so, this helps because you won't see the flood of sub-par filters you might if someone is trying to rush out as many HU potentials as possible. (Would probably want to watermark the filterforge.com samples too to prevent them from just grabbing the submitted preset outputs, though this is pretty trivial.)

I know in my case this would have worked best. (Assuming I didn't get a free copy from beta testing, thanks again ff guys!) Starting out, I never intended to create my own filters, I would have been just using those on the library. In this case I probably would have bought the 7 filter limit one. Joined with the PLE, I could have picked up filtermaking (as I did afterall) and earned the professional version. Sure-- filterforge only made money from the cheapy 7 filter version, but they also gotten good showcase examples from my HU filters (and a dedicated library submitter) where I otherwise might never have taken up filermaking at all.