Despite Photoshop's unrivaled feature set, everyone has a few extra things that they wish the app could do (especially web designers). Fortunately, Photoshop has a rich community of third party developers who are regularly churning out fantastic plugins and extensions to add all kinds of functionality. This is the ad that will display before single page content. Are you missing out on 100s of Free Photoshop Extensions from Adobe? Find some of the finest and amazing extensions right from inside of Photoshop.
Create perspective mockups using CSS3 3D transforms.
Publisher: BlazRobar Price: $19 Best for: Artists, designers
If you can forgive or overlook the gratuitous use of swearing and obscenity on the Perspective Mockups site, the plugin is definitely worth checking out. Essentially it's a great way to make perspective mockups for your designs using CSS3 3D transforms. The plugin sits within your Photoshop tools palette and includes eight different layouts to choose from. Simply click to set. It’s a quick way to give your artwork punch and lift.
Turn your Photoshop styles into clean CSS3.
Publisher: Source Price: $39.99 Best for: Web designers
CSS Hat turns your Photoshop styles into clean CSS3 for your website. Simply click on a layer designed with some layer styles and the styling markup pops up instantly, for you to copy to your clipboard. This is especially useful when rendering specifically sized elements on your page or copying text styles as everything is translated pixel-for-pixel between Photoshop and CSS3. Version 2 also supports both Less and Sass for cleaner code output.
Publisher: Freepik Price: Free Best for: Designers
FlatIcon is a large database of thousands of free vector icons that you can download in SVG, PSD or PNG format. This free Photoshop plugin lets you quickly find all the icons without leaving your working environment, inserting them directly into your design from a panel.
Access Shutterstock's full library from within Photoshop.
Publisher: Shutterstock Price: Free (licence images via plugin) Best for: Designers
Working across the full Creative Suite, this plugin from Shutterstock provides direct in-app access to the huge range of stock imagery available in the Shutterstock library. Search inside Photoshop, click to select and insert, and license directly for an easier workflow. This is especially useful if you commonly licence royalty-free images for use in your designs.
Publisher: RedField Price: $39.90 Best for: Artists and designers
This unusual plugin uses fractal patterns, apparently hidden within the source image, to generate procedural effects that are reminiscent of pencil sketches, or stylised light glow streaks. Fractalius is useful either as the start of a piece of artwork, or to generate abstract imagery for use within a design project.
A pricey but powerful suite of effects.
Publisher: Auto FX Price: $179.99 (currently $89.99) Best for: Photographers
This all-encompassing suite of effects covers everything from textures to pseudo-3D effects, tonal correction and borders. Dream Suite Ultimate is not in any way cheap (although we've seen special offers of up to 50% off on the download page), but as it covers such a wide range of effects it’s worth adding to your shortlist if you’re looking for a single purchase that will give you a lot of power and options without having to maintain a disparate collection of plugins.
Add beautiful, scratchy weathering effects.
Publisher: Mister Retro Price: $99 Best for: Artists and designers
One of our personal favourites, Machine Wash Deluxe filter brings insanely beautiful scratchy textures to your designs and images with accurate, believable weathering and ageing effects. Effects include the ability to place artwork on a leather base, render onto wood with the grain visible through the artwork and rust effects. It produces especially nice effects on simple typography.
This Photoshop plugin simplifies the complex 3D process.
Publisher: Digital Anarchy Price: $175 Best for: Designers
It’s true that Photoshop’s own 3D engine has come on leaps and bounds, there's still room for additional tools that can simplify the process of creating complex 3D scenes and models. The 3D Invigorator Photoshop plugin features a simple object editor that uses a pen-like tool for drawing and editing shapes. The final renders are polished and look good with little input required, making this a good choice for designers who need to generate 3D elements with little fuss.
Create enlargements without compromising on quality.
Publisher: Alien Skin Price: $99 Best for: Photographers and designers
Blow Up allows you to create pin-sharp enlargements from photos without compromising on quality. The algorithm is more advanced than Photoshop's own bicubic filters, which allows the plugin to produce accurate images without artefacts. This makes it a great tool for designers where clients send over images that aren't of a high-enough resolution.
Publisher: HDR Soft Price: $99 Best for: Photographers
PhotoMatix Pro is a high dynamic range (HDR) processing and toning tool that integrates with Photoshop either standalone or as a plugin (depending upon which version you go for). This tool goes beyond Photoshop's built-in HDR processing capabilities, especially with the toning aspects and allows for the creation of extreme HDR images with relative ease. If the $99 price point is too steep for you, there's PhotoMatix Essentials at $39 for those looking for something simpler.
Add a range of effects quickly.
Publisher: ON1 Price: $59.99 Best for: Artists and designers
ON1’s Effects is a handy tool for getting a quick effect on an image, whether that's a colour treatment, addition of texture and noise, or creative borders, this plugin features an effects library (a bit like the filter gallery in Photoshop) and allows you to stack multiple effects to achieve interesting new results.
This specialist tool removes noise and sharpens images.
Publisher: Imagenomic Price: $79.95 Best for: Photographers and designers
Noise is a problem for everyone, but no more so than for photographers who need to present clients with clean images regardless of the conditions in which the shot was captured, and designers who receive sub-par quality images from clients. Noiseware is a specialist noise-suppression tool that will both remove noise and sharpen at the same time making it a really useful addition to Photoshop’s in-built noise management toolset.
Publisher: Digital Anarchy Price: Free Best for: Designers
Texture Anarchy is another plugin that used to charge a premium price, but is now available free of charge. This pack offers a combination of different filters for Photoshop that each provide seamless and rich textures you can incorporate into your designs. Some of these are a little predictable, but the sheer range available, along with the ability to generate true fractals, makes this a great addition to Photoshop.
Publisher: Imagenomic Price: $199.95 Best for: Photographers and designers
Portraiture is a combined plugin for Photoshop, Lightroom and Aperture that automates the process of retouching portraits for a perfect-skin look. The plugin automatically smooths skin tones while removing blemishes and, crucially, avoids softening or destroying detail areas such as eyelashes and skin texture. The price may seem a bit 'whoa!' but this is a top-quality plugin for portrait photographers.
Improved control over PNG images in Photoshop.
Publisher: FNord Price: Free Best for: Designers
If you're a regular user of the PNG format, you'll know that Photoshop can sometimes struggle a bit to render PNGs quickly. SuperPNG aims to fix this by offering more control over your PNG output, allowing for a balance between speed and file size, control over the alpha channel and meta data. SuperPNG's a handy tool for taking control of your image export, and is free! This is becoming less useful as Adobe have substantially improved export for web in recent releases, but if you’re using an older version of Photoshop it’s well worth a look.
Simulate film effects for digital projects.
Publisher: Alien Skin Price: From $149 Best for: Photographers and designers
Exposure is a creative tool that allows you to simulate film effects on your digital images. For its X4 release, publisher Alien Skin has improved its shadow and highlight recovery, as well as adding fully adjustable light effects and transform tools that correct tilted or skewed perspectives. Users can also now create smart collections to automatically organise your photo library (and, boy, is that required around here). Exposure X4 is available as a plugin for Photoshop or Lightroom, or as a complete standalone raw photo editor.
An easy way to create a grid system.
Publisher: Cameron McEfee Price: From $35/year Best for: Designers
GuideGuide is a simple Photoshop plugin makes it easy to create a grid system in your document, hijacking the built-in guides system to create a pinpoint accurate grid according to your chosen settings. You can use negative margins for special hanging columns, separately define individual margins and gutters, and save your preferred options for quick access in the future. Perfect for anyone using a grid to help them create their layouts.
Easily create screenshots from your PSDs.
Publisher: PluginMate Price: $9.99 Best for: Designers
Easily create screenshots from your PSDs with ScreenSnap. The Photoshop plugin aims to make it easier to share screenshots of your WIP or designs. There’s no need to manually crop or use Save for Web: just select a folder, choose your settings and hit the button. And if you’re designing at standard resolution, you can export your screenshot to Retina.
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Photoshop plugins and extensions are an easy way to add functionality to the leading image processing app and to improve your workflow.
You can find plugins for almost anything. Some will simplify the professional skin retouching you’d expect to see on the cover of a glossy magazine, and cost hundreds of dollars. Others take care of boring, repetitive tasks. All will make your life a whole lot easier.
In this guide, we’ll take a look at 10 essential free Photoshop plugins that you should start using right away.
The best free Photoshop plugin is actually a set of seven that also function as standalone apps. The Nik CollectionHow to Get Started with Google's Free Nik Plugins for PhotographyHow to Get Started with Google's Free Nik Plugins for PhotographyGoogle made its Nik Collection plug-ins completely free. The plugins work with photo editing software, such as Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom. Here's how to get started.Read More started out as professional photo processing software that cost $500. Google bought it and eventually made it available for free, but it’s no longer in development. As a result, the software will one day cease to be compatible with your computer. But for now, it is the gold standard of plugins.
The collection consists of:
Each tool installs as its own self-contained program, with the option to add it to Photoshop or Lightroom. If you only choose one of our recommendations from this list, the Nik Collection should be it.
Pexels.com is one of our favorite free stock image sitesThe 15 Best Sites for Free High-Resolution Stock ImagesThe 15 Best Sites for Free High-Resolution Stock ImagesFree high-resolution images are hard to come by. Wouldn't it be nice if you could get free stock images that are curated for quality and resolution? You can!Read More. The free plugin the site provides enables you to access its content without ever leaving Photoshop.
Go to Windows > Extenstions > Pexels to open Pexels.com in its own panel. Here, you can browse images split by Recent or Popular, or view popular searches and tags under the Likes tab. There’s also a search option.
Just click a photo and it will download and insert itself onto a new layer in your open Photoshop file (or will create a new one if none are open). Stock photos are great if you ever need to add a texture to an image, change the backgroundHow to Change the Background of a Photo in PhotoshopHow to Change the Background of a Photo in PhotoshopWant to change the background of a photo in Photoshop? Adobe has made it quite easy to edit the background of a photo.Read More, or for countless other purposes. Having a stock library essentially built into Photoshop really helps simplify your workflow.
You can also get plugins for commercial stock photo services like iStock and Getty. These are free, but you need to pay for the images.
ON1 Effects adds Instagram-style functionality to Photoshop. It provides a massive array of presets covering generic looks like “Hipster” or “Cinematic”, to those fashioned around specific film stock. It also offers a large number of filters that can enhance the colors and tone of your image.
ON1 Effects works as a one-click panel in Photoshop, or you can open the accompanying standalone app for more granular control over how you apply the presets to your photos.
Ink is an add-on for web designers who put their layouts together in Photoshop. It converts the elements in your document into HTML and CSS code so they can be faithfully recreated on a web page.
The information Ink generates is pretty detailed. It’ll give you info on fonts used, and their size, color, leading and tracking, and so on. It’ll create code for shadows and gradients, and also pixel-perfect measurements between the various elements that make up your design.
Another tool for web developers, CSS3Ps turns individual layers into CSS code. Photoshop has some of this functionality built in, but the plugin goes further by giving you SCSS and SASS code as well.
CSS3Ps can also be quicker when you’re working on complex designs, as it’s all cloud based. It’s an excellent tool, and takes a lot of the pain out of designing buttons, especially when using shadows, glows, and other effects.
Photoshop offers support for many file formats into which you can save your images. PNG is one of them, but the options you get when saving are very limited.
You get a lot more control with SuperPNG. There are more settings to find the right balance between speed and quality — somewhat counterintuitively a lower quality image takes longer to save, due to the sluggishness of PNG compression. You can also retain transparency in an image, and keep or remove the metadata.
When you’re working with typography in Photoshop you’re limited to using the fonts you’ve got installed on your computer. There are a few plugins that can give you more fonts — — but sometimes these cost money, and you have to check the usage rights for each font.
A simpler choice is Fontea, which gives you access to Google FontsHow to Use Google Fonts in Adobe PhotoshopHow to Use Google Fonts in Adobe PhotoshopTired of downloading fonts only to test them and realize that they aren't exactly what you need? With this Photoshop plugin, you can test and use over 800 fonts provided by Google.Read More. They’re all free and open source, so there’s no issue with usage. Just browse through the fonts, filtering down to the styles that you’re after. Each font will download automatically when you need it, and you can remove them just as easily.
Some of the most essential Photoshop plugins and extensions are the ones that simplify common tasks. That’s certainly true of Long Shadow Generator 2, which does exactly what its name suggests.
The options are deliberately sparse. You can adjust the angle, length, and darkness of the shadow you want. You can also choose between a flat shadow or one that fades the further it travels. And you can produce white shadows when your text or objects are on a dark background. But if you prefer, you can do it all with just one click.
Layers are an integral part of Photoshop10 Must-Know Introductory Photoshop Skills for Beginner Photographers10 Must-Know Introductory Photoshop Skills for Beginner PhotographersIn this guide, we take a look at some Photoshop features you can dive straight into, even if you have little or no previous photo editing experience.Read More, but once you’ve got a lot in your document managing them becomes a tedious task.
Layrs Control 2 makes the process a lot easier. It makes seven common layer management actions accessible through a single panel. They are:
You’d usually have to do all these tasks manually, or find or create your own scripts to handle them. That’s no longer the case with this plugin, which is a real time saver.
If you ever need to drop a Twitter or Shopping Cart icon onto your website you probably use Font Awesome to do the job. With Font Awesome PS you can now use the same iconic font in your Photoshop designs as well.
There are 675 icons to choose from. They’re added to your image as vector shapes, so they can be resized, colored, and edited with no loss of quality.
Plugins and extensions install and work in different ways. Some are installed just like regular programs. Some download in ZIP files and need to be copied manually to the Photoshop plugins or extensions directory — check the website for instructions in these cases.
If the add-on is in the ZXP format, try the app ZXPInstaller, available for both Windows and Mac. This replaces the now defunct Adobe Extensions Manager, which used to be used to install these files.
You can access the add-ons in one of a few different places. You’ll normally find them under Windows > Extensions. Sometimes you’ll find them in the Filter menu. In the case of SuperPNG, above, you’ll find it as a file format in the Save As… menu.
All the plugins work non-destructively. Any edits they make to your images go on separate layers, leaving you free to experiment to find the ones that best suit how you work. Plugins, among other advanced features, make Photoshop one of the most essential resources for graphic designers7 Essential Tools, Software, and Services for Illustrators7 Essential Tools, Software, and Services for IllustratorsWorking as an illustrator can be a daunting task. However, these essential tools for illustrators will help keep you on track.Read More of all stripes.
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I know that the Nik Collection plugins work in Photoshop Elements, but what about the rest of them?
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