Photoshop plug-ins are the add-ons that power a Photoshop user.

They make a complicated task much easier & help creating amazing effects, designing faster & better.

There are lots of free Photoshop plug-ins which can fire your skills. This post aims to present  most of them (150+) in a comprehensive way.
 

How to install Photoshop plug-ins?

Photoshop plug-ins are .8bf files. After downloading a plug-in, simply place it in the presets>plug-ins folder of the Photoshop's installation folder (creating a folder with a name defining the plug-in & placing the plug-in files inside the folder will make it more organized).

Here they are:

AlphaWorks – Transparency Effects

A free Photoshop plugin for easily removing black or white values and making the region transparent.

It provides 6 different filters to match any photo type.

ColourWorks – Colour Modification

It has 20 effects to modify image colour values in several ways.

The plug-in can be used for digital-photo color correction or any other transformations.

EdgeWorks – Cool Artistic Styles

It has 20 effects to create dramatic edge and colour modifications.

This Photoshop plugin is handy for photo transformations for a highly stylized look & creating interesting texture effects

ScreenWorks

Easily create screen/mesh patterns with 30 options.

In one step, you can add small detailed and repetitive texture overlay effects to areas of your image.

Read the rest of this entry »

Bubbling Library is an easy to adopt Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library extension for event-driven applications.

It consists of a set of plugins, behaviors and widgets.

This YUI extension has the following features:

• Plugins
  • Dispatcher
  • Lighter
  • Form Manager
  • Sound Manager
  • Translator
• Widgets
  • Accordion Manager
  • Loading Mask
  • Tooltip Manager
• Behaviors
  • Bookmark Links
  • RSS Feed Links

Bubbling Library is well-documented and has lots of examples of every feature.

Community Engine is a free, open-source social network plugin for Ruby on Rails applications. Drop it into your new or existing application, and you’ll instantly have all the features of a basic community site.

Features of this social network plugin:

• Authentication (sign up, log in)
• User profiles
• User search
• Blogs with tagging, categories and rich text editing
• Photo uploading and tagging
• “Clippings” – visual bookmarks
• Commenting and comment notification by e-mail (Blogs, profiles, photos, and clippings can be commented)
• Forums
• Friendships and activity feeds
• Favoriting of clippings and blog posts
• And more!

Every web designer pushes the "Print Screen" button few times a day to work on the screenshot or just to find the color codes of a specific area.

When the whole webpage screenshot is needed "Print Screen" may not be enough.

Screengrab! is a Firefox plugin which helps you to get the entire page screenshot (visible area or selected area too), copy it to clipboard or directly save it.

It saves you so much time once you get used to it. You don’t need to plan for the perfect screenshot all the time, just get the whole and play with it using your image editing software.

jQuery Cycle plugin is a lightweight plugin which lets users to create animated slideshows.

jQuery already has slide plugins and this plugin covers most of the effects and some effects are based on other jQuery plugins.

The Cycle Plugin is split into two parts: the core engine and the transition definitions. The core engine provides the ‘fade’ transition effect and all the logic needed for defining and using custom transitions. The Transition pack includes all of the pre-defined transition effects for the Cycle Plugin.

Slideshow effects includes:

• pause-on-hover
• auto-stop,
• auto-fit
• before/after callbacks
• click triggers
• and many transition effects

Mr Uptime is one of the Firefox plugins that I use and love.

Everybody has an experience with websites being unreachable because of web hosting or technical problems. After that, we may forget to check that website again or spend so much time to see whether it is online or not.

Mr Uptime simply informs the user when an unreachable website becomes reachable again.

Usage is also simple. When a website in unreachable at the time you’re trying to browse, a small menu appears which helps you to add the website to the watchlist with 1 click. Another nice feature is watching a website for a text parameter to appear too. If that text appears on the website Mr Uptime warns you.

The famous Lightbox type information windows are very usable in many cases like showing alerts, giving tips to users, showing media content inside them & many more.

jqModal is also a lightweight window plugin written for jQuery which improves & makes easier the use of windows.

Features:

• Inline or remote (ajax/iframe) Window Content.
• Modal-in-modal and Multiple Independent Modal support
• Tailor behavior "on-the-fly" with easy to understand parameters and callbacks
• DOM element events are preserved, remote (ajax) javascript is evaluated
• Translator/i18n friendly; no hardcoded English strings
• Designer Friendly; abstracted HTML, CSS, and Javascript
• Support for Drag’n'Drop + Resizing
• Extendable through callbacks to make anything (gallery slideshows, video-conferencing, etc.) possible

curvyCorners is a javascript based solution for getting rounded corners without images for any html div element.

There are other javascript solutions which offers similar features. Some of these solutions have problems with backgrounds, sharpness of the corners. curvyCorners is between the good ones.

There is also a jQuery plugin created for curvyCorners.

Features

- Free
- Easy to use JavaScript object
- Requires no images or image editing
- Full Anti-Aliasing support
- Anti-Aliasing over graphical backgrounds
- Background-image support (round corners of images)
- Fluid height/width support
- Solid border support, any colour/width with Anti-Aliasing
- User defined per corner radiuses

Creating icons (.ico files) inside Photoshop is not supported by default.

With this small yet easy to use plugin it is possible to import and export them with Photoshop.

In addition to Adobe Photoshop, the plug-in can work with Elements, AfterEffects, Premiere, PhotoDeluxe, Corel PhotoPaint, PaintShop Pro, Painter, and Photo.

Pagepeel, or the "magic corner" type banners were invented by Visualsteel.

They create a new banner area for websites without effecting the current banner areas and easy to implement. On the other hand, pagepeel banners have a relatively high "click per view ratio".

Including Pageear to the websites requires the steps below:

- Download Pageear files.
- Unzip the filed in a folder.
- Create to images with sizes 100×100 and 500×500. 100×100 sized image is the one which will be shown when Pageear is closed and 500×500 will be shown when user mouse overs the Pageear banner. You can pageear_b.jpg ve pageear_s.jpg files as an example. BTW, .GIF and .PNG are not supported.
- Open the Pageear.js file wit a text editor and update the paths to the .JPG and .SWF files depending on your setup.
- Include Pageear.js and AC_OETags.js in to the webpages where Pageear banner will be displayed (example below).
- Place the writeObjects() javascript function under your body tag.
- That’s all.

Pageear can also be implemented easily with the ready to use WordPress plugin, Joomla module or Typo3 extension (download links below).

Html Code Example

<html>
<head>
<title></title>
<script src= " /path_on_your_server/AC_OETags.js " mce_src= " /path_on_your_server/AC_OETags.js " language= " Javascript " ></script>
<script src= " /path_on_your_server/pageear.js " mce_src= " /path_on_your_server/pageear.js " type= " text/Javascript " ></script>
</head>
<body>
<! – Beginning of contents – >
Lorem ipsum Lorem ipsum Lorem ipsum Lorem ipsum Lorem ipsum Lorem ipsum Lorem ipsum Lorem ipsum Lorem ipsum Lorem ipsum Lorem ipsum Lorem ipsum
<! – End of contents->

<script type= " text/Javascript " >
writeObjects ();
</script>

</body>
</html>