I welcome feedback about my software, especially requests for improvements because they give me something to aim for. I can't guarantee to match commercial products, but it's sometimes possible to get quite close with a little bit of additional effort.

Jens, if you send me a non-jpeg version of your original graphic I'll see if I can get closer to the performance of the KPT version, but no promises!

Regarding the emboss filter, I'm not sure what edge defects you're talking about. If you mean the colour fringes on the yellow 'spheres', that's the normal result of this type of embossing (i.e. happens in Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro etc.). I could easily get rid of it but then the filter wouldn't be standard, although I'll do it if everybody wants it to work that way. The alternative is to convert the image to greyscale either before or after embossing.

Regards - Sean