The most used 111 Photoshop Plugin

Fiddaman Plugins
Tom Fiddaman offers six free photo correction plugins (for Windows) that were created with Filter Meister. The SelfToner plugin tones images from their own palette or with tones from other images, PFree reduces purple fringing whereas CAfree reduces blue fringing and NoisePlot visualizes noise. Finally, the Luminosity plugin is meant for highlight and shadow correction and Reluminate performs luminosity adjustments. The plugins aren’t that easy to use, because many sliders have very technical names and only a few explanations are offered on the product pages. Additionally many slider settings produce effects that aren’t that desirable, so you need to fiddle a lot with the sliders. Nevertheless it is worth trying them.

virtualPhotographer
… allows you to create a variety of photographic styles. Effects like film grain, soft focus, B/W, B/W tinting and high contrast can be applied to the image in one step. It also offers many presets which can be fine tuned for your requirements.

Reindeergraphics.com Plugins
… include several free plugins for photo editing. The Wide Histogram plugin displays enhanced histogram of 16-bit images. The plugin provides a 512, 768, or 1024 pixel wide histograms and eight modes for the histogram, including RGB, Red, Green, Blue, Colors, Hue, Saturation and Luminance. The Custom Filteris an enhanced version of the custom/user filters that can be found in various image applications. It supports a 7×7 convolution array, accepts real (floating point) numbers for greater precision and lets you save and open presets. The Adaptive Equalization plugin increases the local contrast of images by reducing overall dynamic range. The Enter Magnificationfilter calculates the length of a calibration bar. TabbedText reads and writes a grayscale images from and to a tab-delimited text file. The text file can be created and manipulated in a spreadsheet like Excel or produced with text output from any arbitrary source. The Select Edges plugin creates a selection from the contours of the edges in the image. With the help of that selection you can selectively process the image with other filters like Gaussian Blur or Unsharp Mask.

ChannelMixer – Currently Down
… is a freeware plugin that is meant for Photoshop Elements users, which don’t have a tool with that name in their application. Unlike Photoshop’s ChannelMixer it lets you only do custom conversion to B&W and no color effects. Unfortunately this plugin has the same problem as his Photoshop counterpart: it doesn’t keep brightness constant when converting to B&W, so you have to be careful when using it.

Flo’s UnDistort filter
…. is a plugin for correcting deformations of photographic images, e.g. barrel and pincushion deformations, perspective deformations and chromatic aberrations. The demo version is completely functional for images smaller than about 800*600 pixels. For processing bigger images, you have to purchase the full version for $15.

Polaroid Dust & Scratch Removal Utility
The Polaroid Dust & Scratch Removal Utility consists of a standalone application and a plugin. The application offers various tools for creating selections whereas the plugin offers an interactive preview which makes it easier to create the desired effect. Although it sometimes renders quite slowly, it is a nice addition to the Dust & Scratch Removal tool in some graphics applications.

Sharpen filter
…. is a very simple filter which lets you only adjust the sharpness intensity. It is a bit superior to the Sharpen filter that is built into many image editing applications. The download link for this filter is at the bottom of the page.

Colleen’s Photoshop Fun Pack
5 filter plug-ins for Adobe Photoshop for Macintosh. Rotate Color rotates the color in the RGB space. Create B/W creates black and white (gray scale) images from color images. Kwick Mask creates a selection from RGB images. Adjust Saturation gives you more control over the saturation adjustment. Modulate Color modulates the HSB value of the image using the mask value. Variable Blur achieves soft-focus effects very easily.

AIM DeepSpace & Photoshop Plugins
Some plugins with basic image manipulation functions plus 5 other plugins: The GAMMA filter applies the accurate gamma transfer function, DENSITY provides density conversion which can be useful in creating a density mask. SPACE HUNTER is useful as the first step in editing images of unknown working space and generally for hue, saturation and white-balance corrections. USM is a Unsharp Mask filter.

Metrix
… is a plugin for adapting two images to each by match the colors of both images. The adapted images can e.g. be used to create a panorama image. Only works fine with very similiar images.

Red Prince Flips ‘n Rolls, Noise Generator, Whitewash & Pixie Dust
Flips ‘n’ Rolls is a collection of 19 plugins without dialogs that flip, roll, invert and reverse the order of bits in the RGB channels. The Noise Generator plugin creates a noise effect and the Whitewash plugin makes white colors transparent. The Pixie Dust collection consists of 19 plugins (only some of them have a dialog) that create various simple contrast, brightness, monochrome and solarisation effects.

Web Design

3D Shadow
Lokas Software offers the free 3D Shadow Photoshop-compatible plugin. It creates various types of 3D shadows from a selection. Settings include transparency level, perspective, shadow color, position and X/Y/Z angles. The preview only shows the image at 100% and there is no zoom option. This makes it very hard to adjust the effect if the selection is almost as large or larger as the preview.

WebClipper & PhotoHTML
“WebClipper” from Boxtopsoft corrects the color drift from Web safe colors that often happens during color reduction and allows you to create hybrid images combining custom and Web safe colors easily. Hybrid images allow for greater image quality than those color reduced to the Web safe palette, while still largely eliminating most unwanted dithering when images are viewed on 8-bit Windows systems. “PhotoHTML” converts any image to an HTML table. Each pixel in the image becomes a 1 x 1 pixel colored cell in the table.

Gregory Paret’s Plugins
“Grids” is a plugin for placing grids on your image, “Polygons” draws N-sided polygons and a circle, “Color Counter” counts the colors used in an image, “Selection Outliner and Un-Featherer” finds the rectangular outline of a selection and has options to remove feathering from a selection, while the “Gamma Filter” tries to compensate the fact that the Photoshop Levels control does not do an arithmetically consistent Gamma adjustment. Finally “HTML Color Tags” which is only available for Windows displays the current foreground and background in hexadecimal format.

NRV Bordermania Pro
The Bordermania filters are designed to create a variety of basic borders and buttons around images and are suited for creating buttons for Web pages. BorderMania Pro is free for a 30 day evaluation period and after that a license fee of $10 is required to use the enhanced features. If you don’t register them, the filters continue to work, but lack special Pro features.

Extensis PhotoBevel
… instantly creates inner and outer bevels on any part of your image or text. Lets you adjust bevel width, softness, highlight/shadow balance, intensity, and light direction.

Extensis PhotoText
… applies bold, italic, outline and shadow styles without requiring the corresponding printer fonts.

Patterns / Textures

Knitted Fabric & Oriental Lines ‘n Dots
The Knitted Fabric & Oriental Lines ‘n Dots plugins from Birgit Wegner-Spinella produce knitted backgrounds and oriental patterns.

Redfield Freeware Plugins
Jama 3D and Lattice Composer are two 8bf plugins for creating cellular and mesh structures from 2D images, as well as 3D shapes and backgrounds.
Seamless Workshop creates seamless tiles of any image by cross blending the borders of the image. Water Ripples creates realistic water ripples and produces unlimited variations of rippled surfaces. The Craquelure 3D plugin creates a wide range of well known craquelure effects.The Face Control plugin allows you to change facial expressions in a simple fashion. Human, animal, alien, or any other kind of faces are possible. The Redfield++ Bas-Relief filter plugin turns 8-bit RGB images into a carved-in bas-relief with controlable surface lighting. The effect can also make the image look like aluminum foil, hammered metal, carved stone or pencil sketch.

MaP | Zone FREE
… is a texture modeling plugin for Photoshop and Illustrator. It lets you create and edit FX-Maps. It is based on a set of 400+ presets, which can be modified with special tools to create non-photorealistic texture effects.

Birgits Chaos – Currently Down
… is a set of 19 plugins (for Windows) that produce nice fabric patterns. They were created with FilterMeister.

Tessela Plugins
Eric Jones also offers two nice plugins (for Windows) called Tessela and Check Out. They generate nice kaleidoscopic and chess-like patterns.

Filter Farm
is a freeware plugin that creates colorful noise effects according to random algorithms.

Painting & Drawing

Deep Paint 2
Right Hemisphere decided to discontinue their DeepPaint 2 product and make it available for free. Deep Paint is a painting tool that offers artistic photo-cloning, fully editable brush and canvas settings. It simulates oil, acrylic and watercolor brushes. Deep Paint works as a Photoshop plugin as well as standalone application. For more information see here.

Fantastic Machines’ Paint Engine
… has different presets for turning photos into paintings.

Wacom Pen Tools
… for working with a Wacom tablet.

3D
Adobe’s Google 3D Warehouse Plugin

Adobe released a free plugin (for Windows/Mac) that provides access to the Google 3D Warehouse from within Photoshop CS3 Extended. With it you can participate in the 3D Warehouse community by searching, storing and sharing thousands of free 3D models and other content. Models include everything needed for a 3D world including: buildings, houses, bridges, statues, sculptures, couches, cars, people, pets and more.

Normal Map Generation Filter & PhotoShop DXT Compression Plugin
Nvidia offer two free plugins for Windows. The Normal Map Generation Filter allows you to convert any image or layer to a normal map. It also includes a 3D preview with per-pixel lighting to view the generated normal map. The PhotoShop DXT Compression Plugin lets you read and write compressed or uncompressed .dds files. The plugins require DirectX8 and msvcr70.dll to run. Both can be downloaded from their web site.

Rasterizer Plug
… is a plug-in for Photoshop 5.0 or later that renders hi-resolution screenshots of 3D models included in Infinity MetaFiles directly onto a Photoshop layer with transparency.

CALLISTO – Currently Down
is a shareware plugin for Adobe Photoshop that allows Photoshop users to create terrains and spheroidal objects and also import and render 3DMF models. When using Callisto you can manipulate 3DMF models on the screen and make adjustments to lighting and background before rendering it out. Callisto is fully functional and lets you save your output either in 2D (at 320×240 pixels) or as a 3DMF model. Users who pay the shareware fee can output 2D renderings at resolutions up to 2560 x 1920 pixels.
Various

Superrune Plugins
… for retouching spherical and equirectangular panoramas. The plugins will map the panorama distortions to flat planes so that they are easily edited. The retouched parts can also be converted back to spherical/equirectangular to apply the edits to your original panorama.

Telegraphics Plugins
Telegraphics offer several plugins (for Win/Mac). The 5_6_5 plugin reduces 8bit RGB channels to 16 bits or 65536 colors whereas the 12bits plugin reduces images to 12 bits or 4096 colors. The Count Color plugin counts distinct RGB colors in an image or selection. “Life” implements Conway’s Life cellular automaton which produces patterns that own certaincharacteristics of life. Histotext exports histogram numbers as a text file. The Scramble Filter break an image into square or rectangular blocks and rearranges them randomly like a sliding block puzzle.
GML GrowCut & Matting
Grow Cut is for separating objects in an image from the background. To create a selection you need to place loosely paints with a brush inside and outside the objects that you want to have masked. the GML Matting plugin is a masking plugin for extracting objects from their background. It supports output to the layer mask and even applications without an opacity channel. The GML Image Undistorter application is also offered for free on the same web site.

Panorama Tools Plug-ins (16-bit)
The Panorama Tools plugins, originally written by Helmut Dersch, now support both 8-bit and 16-bit images. They are compatible with Photoshop 5.5 and above and Paint Shop Pro.

Proxel EXIF Tool
… is a Photoshop plugin that can display EXIF and other meta information of a certain file. It is based on the Perl::ExifTool, so you will need Perl, e.g. ActivePerl, and the Perl::ExifTool installed on your computer in order to use the plugin.

SF Maskerade LE
… creates luminance masks, color masks and saturation masks. More masking options can be found in the commercial version.

Disable VM Buffering Plugin for Photoshop
… can be installed to eliminate pauses during painting on MacOS X machines with more than 4GB of physical RAM. However, there are some cost in performance with very large documents. It will have no effect on machines with 4GB or less RAM.

FilterFoundry
Filter Foundry is basically a Filter Factory plugin clone. It works with Photoshop 3 – 7 on Power Macs (OS X, OS 9 and earlier), 68K Mac and under Windows. That means that it supports more platforms than the original FilterFactory from Adobe which was discontinued. It also is scriptable. The author asks for a donation if you use this product.

4N6site Plugins
4N6site.com offers three freeware plugins (for Windows), which are mainly meant for forensic tasks. “Color Deconvolve”separates or removes color components from the image, the Digitization plugin saves coordinates of features in large images a text file and the Fourier Transform plugin filters images in the frequency domain, e.g. for separating or enhancing periodical patterns. The plugins are requested and distributed by email.

FilterFormula
ATS Graphics is giving away their FilterFormula plugin (for Windows), which wasn’t updated since 1999, for free. FilterFormula is an advanced version of FilterFactory and can be used to create your own Photoshop-compartible plugins. To get the plugin you have to enter a name and valid email address. The download instructions are sent out manually, so it can take several days.

XLProfiler
… is a freeware ICC profiler for digital cameras and scanners, it is a combination of a Microsoft Excel Workbook and a standard Adobe Photoshop plug-in filter. The procedure looks quite complex, so you need to invest some time.

AutoCrop
… is a selection plugin for Photoshop 5 and higher (for Windows). It creates a selection on images with an uniform border. This selection can then be used to crop the image with Photoshop’s own Crop function.

xMeta
fnord offers the free xMeta package (for Macintosh), a set of three simple plugins for exporting metadata from Photoshop in raw binary form. It can export ICC Profiles, EXIF camera data and IPTC press information. ICC Profiles are of particular interest, as they can be added to the ColorSync profiles folder.

Digimarc Watermark Plugin
Digiamrc offers a free 1.7 upgrade for their watermarking plugin which is delivered with many image applications for Mac and Windows. The Digimarc plugin enable you to detect, embed, and read Digimarc watermarks with many leading image editing applications.

Type Chameleon – Not available anymore?
… from Jintek is a free Photoshop plugin for creating type effects. It produces wildly distorted type on a path, circle, arc or trapezoid as well as rotates, skews and distorts shapes and adds borders, fills, and drop shadows. The result can be directly rasterized and merged with the image or saved as an EPS file if you want to keep the type resolution independent . The EPS file can then be copied into any Photoshop layer, where it will adapt to the resolution of the rest of the Photoshop file. Type Chameleon requires Photoshop 4.0 or later and Adobe Type Manager 3.5 or later.

Vischeck
… shows you how things look to someone who is colorblind. You can try Vischeck online, but you can also download plugins for Photoshop or for ImageJ to run. Many pictures, documents and web pages are hard to read for colorblind people (up to 5% of the population) because they cannot distinguish some colors. Vischeck lets designers check their work for colorblind visibility. It is also interesting to anyone who is just plain curious about what the world looks like if you are color blind.

Pro Canvas & WallPampered
Pro Canvas is an automation plugin designed to enhance and replace the existing Canvas command in Adobe Photoshop. While providing you with all of the standard Canvas options (in Absolute mode), Pro Canvas also adds a powerful new Relative mode that allows you to add or subtract from each side independently and simultaneously. WallPampered is an automation plugin (.8li) for Adobe Photoshop only, which allows you to set your Windows desktop wallpaper instantly from within Photoshop itself. When the plugin is installed you activate it from the Automate sub menu found of the File menu in Photoshop. Both plugins are Shareware or Honorware and have no nags or time limits.

Panorama Tools
… allow to generate, edit and transform many kinds of panoramic images.

The Photoshop 7.0 Scripting plugin: Windows Download / Mac Download
… lets you automate repetitive tasks and key workflows in Adobe Photoshop 7.0. It lets you write scripts using JavaScript, Visual Basic or AppleScript to do certain tasks in Photoshop automatically. This plugin is already installed by default with Photoshop CS.

Image Format / Importing

Telegraphics Plugins
…. let you open EI images, Windows ICO, MacPaint, Paint Shop Pro 5-7, SGI, GameBoy Advanced, WBMP, 8XI and DITABIS/DIBIS files in Photoshop. Additionally the Photoshop File Extract/Recover plugin recovers image layers from corrupted PSD and PSB files that Photoshop does not or only partially open. The TIFFlib Format Plugin opens and saves TIFF files with a wider variety of TIFF flavours and compression types than Photoshop itslef.

Microsoft HD Photo Plugin
The BETA release of the Microsoft HD Photo plugin adds support for the HD Photo format to Photoshop CS2 and CS3. The HD Photo format offers compression with up to twice the efficiency of JPEG with fewer damaging artifacts. HD Photo offers both lossless and lossy image compression, and can retain the full dynamic range and color gamut data from a camera’s sensor.

Genuine Fractals Reader Plugin
OnOne Software made the Genuine Fractals Reader Plugin for Photoshop CS and CS2 (Win/Mac) available. It is a format plugin that lets you open images in the Genuine Fractals .STN format, which were saved by the commercial Genuine Fractals product. It uses a unique fractal-based algorithm to increase the size of images by creating artificial details that are relatively similar to the original details. So you can now send people your photos as small .STN files, because these people just need the free Genuine Fractals Reader Plugin and don’t need to buy the commercial product. For downloading it look under “General Downloads”.

JNG Format Plugin
The JNG (JPEG Network Graphics) Format encapsulates a JPEG datastream in PNG-style chunks. Although JNG was primarily a MNG sub format, standalone JNG files are also possible now. The JNG file format plugin for Photoshop from T. Philipp doesn’t have a web site yet, but can be downloaded from:

Olympus RAW-Plug-in 2.0
… lets you import and process .orf RAW photos captured with an Olympus camera in Photoshop. It offers a preview and several options for adjusting exposure, white balance, contrast, sharpness, saturation and color space. If you already own Photoshop CS or CS2, we recommend that you use the Camera RAW plugin (that is already installed with Photoshop) instead.

Photoshop DDS Plugin
… allows you to open DDS files in Photoshop. DDS files are skin files from a game from Crytek. You need to create an account to download it.

CartaPGM
… is a Photoshop plugin that reads and writes files in the Portable Gray Map (PGM) format.

FITS Liberator
… lets you open and process astronomical images in FITS format in 8 and 16bit. It was designed for Photoshop and Photoshop Elements, but it also seems to work in Paint Shop Pro.

JPEG2000 File Format Plugin
LEAD Technologies released a free JPEG2000 file format plugin for Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro. The J2K and JP2 formats are supported for 8bit and 24bit images, there are lossless and lossy compression options and the file size can be controlled precisely. To get this plugin you have to place it in the order cart and carry out an order without paying anything.

Dempsey’s Olympus RAW File Import Plugin
Paul Dempsey offers an Olympus RAW File (.ORF) import plugin as well as a standalone application at his web site. The plugin offers options for Color Balance, Gamma Correction, Auto Levels, Inversion and B/W. The standalone ORF.exe program is a much later development than the plugin and therefore includes many more features. ORF.exe offers separate histograms and more scaling (color balance) options. There is also an accompanying ORFDump tool for recreating thumbnail (.THM) files and extracting EXIF information to a text file.

j2k and SuperPNG
j2k (Macintosh) is a Photoshop plugin for reading and writing the JPEG 2000 file format, the successor to JPEG. Also known as JP2, JPEG 2000 uses wavelet compression to create small images with less objectionable artifacts than JPEG’s DCT compression. It also features: Alpha transparency, Lossless compression mode and 16-bit color. SuperPNG (Win/Mac) is a plugin for saving PNG (“ping”) files. SuperPNG is also much faster than Adobe’s PNG plugin and supports: Variable Compression, Gamma Correction and Meta Data saving.

UnWired or WBMP file format plugin
… lets you quickly and easily save wireless bitmap (WBMP) files e.g. for use in WAP sites. The plugin can be used with Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro or any other application that supports .8bi file format plugins.

The ECW v2.0 file format plugin
… enables you to read and compress Enhanced Compressed Wavelet (ECW) v2.0 images from within Photoshop. The Open Standard ECW technology is a large-image compression technology that enables applications to compress imagery. The plugin allows reading compressed ECW images of any size. However, as Photoshop has a limit of 32,000 x 32,000 pixel for image size, the plug-in will automatically reduce the image size to less than this size if you open a larger ECW file. You can create compressed ECW images by using File->Save to the ECW format from within Photoshop. This plugin restricts the image size being compressed to 500MB.

The PRINT Image Matching Plug-in for Adobe Photoshop
…. is available on the Photoshop 7.0 CD and for Photoshop 6.0 and Adobe Photoshop Elements 1.0 on the PRINT Image Matching web site. It is designed to import JPEG files containing P.I.M. information and retains the P.I.M. effects during the importing process. This PRINT Image Matching Plug-in meets the needs of many digital photographers who want to be able to import an image into Photoshop and not lose the valuable P.I.M. data. To use the PRINT Image Matching technology you need the combination of a PRINT Image Matching-enabled digital camera, printer and software.