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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.

EmbossWorks

The plug-in has helps creating various quick and easy embossing styles with 30 effects. T

They are helpful when adding a sense of depth or relief to an otherwise flat image.

SwapShop – Colour Exchange

Easily switch colour values in your images with 15 filters.

You can reach surreal effects by playing with the combinations.

MasterBlaster – Maximum Colour Toning

Use intense colour into your images with 20 filters.

Ideal for adding dramatic impacts to your photos or work.

Mezzy – Artistic Grain

15 effects to create simple grain and mezzo styles.

B/W Conversion

A Photoshop black-white conversion plugin with powerful features.

Tones of every color can be managed. And there are ready to use popular presets, an option to simulate the effect of color lens & more.

Selective Saturation

Sometimes using saturation may caouse some parts of the the images to be "over-saturated".

Using the plug-in, you can define a "saturation zone" and apply a saturation to only that area.

Local Contrast Enhancement

This is used to bring out the details.

It simply increases the contrast between a pixel's value and the mean value of the adjacent pixels in a local area.

High Pass Sharpening

This Photoshop plug-ing sharpens images with the high-pass method (high-pass is known as producing less halos).

Soft Focus

Give a soft focus effect to images.

You can set:

• focus softness
• overall strength of the effect
• blending mode of  the overlayed blured image.

Lens Correction

A plug-in for fixing barrel and pincushion distortions that are produced by most  zoom camera lenses.

Contrast Mask

It decreases the overall contrast of the image, helps bringing out details in highlights and shadows.

Gradient Blur

This Photoshop filter helps drawing viewer's attention to specific point by simply bluring other parts.

Xpose

A plug-in to adjust exposure.

Easily adjust highlights and shadows & preview the results.

DepthDither

It is specially suitable to be used on images that will be displayed on LCD screens which may show color steps in a gradient effect.

virtualPhotographer

With over 50 presets, this amazing Photoshp plugin can auto-apply combinations of

• film grain
• color modification
• B/W
• soft focus
• high contrast & more..

It also has lots of other free effects (click here).

AAA Options

It provides 50 filter options & 16 blend modes.

Effects are specially useful to be used on frames.

AAA Blur Options

A plug-ing providing Gaussian blur filter options (color blur & soft light).

Filter Forge Freepack 1 – Metals

7 metal textures and effects including alien-looking or industrial metallic surfaces, rust or aluminum foil, and more.

Filter Forge Freepack 2 – Photo Effects

7 photo enhancing effects.

Add sunny style, apply grunge look or color tints, age the image, and more to your photos.

Filter Forge Freepack 3 – Frames

7 filters for creating frames to your photos.

Some of them are: a realistic painted wooden frame or a vignette, a classic elegant feel or a ragged harsh look, and more.

Camouflage

Create an army-look with Photoshop easily.

The plug-in enables you to control 8 color layers including old & new army colors.

Night-Vision

This Photoshop night vision filter can make any image like night-vision googles do.

Images can be transformed to:

• like they are in a black-white or CCTV security camera
• an infra-red look

Snowflakes

Control all aspects of snow like sizes, amount & more.

By playing with the colors, you can even make them look like confettis.

Snowscape

Decide which areas the snow should fall down on by making the rest of the image transparent, then start the plug-in, configure how much and where the snow should fall, and SnowScape does the rest

Outliner

Easily get the outlines of an image.

It picks out various edges making them more expressive.

Dreamy Photo

Add a dreamy effect to images.

It gives a warm & soft feel. Some features are:

• Add Ghost Contrasts to images
• Offset Ghosting with Zoom angles and degrees
• Blend in Transitions and Ghosting

Mosaic

A beautiful plug-in providing various results of mosaic looks. You have:

• photo-realistic depth
• variable tile size
• color options

to play with.

Iridescent

Amount of reflection, colour strength, smoothing can be played with to create a pearl-like effect.

Water Ripples

With a 3D look & feel, the plug-in has several options to create realistic water ripple effects.

Jama 3D

Create corrugated and cellular like patterns from 2D images.

Making various bricks, herring bone textures or crumpled paper effects is very easy.

Lattice Composer

A deformation plug-in for Photoshop.

It produces a variety of weave patterns, fabric textures, body art tattoos and skeleton simulations. with extraordinary 3D text effects.

Luce

Control the light in all aspects to create stunning effects.

Stereogram Lab Filter

A plug-in for creating hidden image stereograms.

Mosaic Toolkit

Add mosaic effects to images.

It has several mosaic styles like: squares, rings, balls, gears & more.

Cell size and contrast can be set as well as the ball glow & brightness.

Smart Refinement Filter

This Photoshop plug-in has the following features:

• sharpness
• depth-of-field (DOF) enhancement
• noise reduction

Fur 2

It disperses a simple figure (a line, acircle..) over the image.

Kaleidoscope

This Photoshop kaleidoscope filter has 3 effects:

• Mirror
• Copy
• Blend

to get attractive results.

Sorting Tiles

Image is cut in several blocks, sorting of colours is done and they are redistributed as patterns.

Thredgeholder

Easily detect edges of images.

Chalkaholic

This Photoshop sketch plugin is a compilation of chalk and charcoal type effects with artistic panache and flair.

3D Shadow

Easily create different types of 3D shadows from any object.

All settings are present in a single window – transparency level, perspective, shadow color and position, X/Y/Z angles, and some others.

Photoshop Plug-ins By Graham White

Graham White is presenting 2 filter sets with a total of 9 filters.

The filters are:

• Bleach Bypass
• Blur Threshold
• Dual Threshold
• RGB to Grayscale
• Blur Color
• Blur Custom
• Channel Noise
• Channel Shift
• Plain Gradient

Sinedots 2

This plug-in can help creating wavy effects. And, mostly, you'll be surprised with the random results you get.

Shear

With several distortions, get a shear effect.

Retro Dots

Easily create retro dot grids based on selections. Simple yet effective.

Several Free Photoshop Plug-ins

A set of free plug-ins like ornament, ghost, solidify & more..

Blots 2

With 3 modes: normal, camouflage & gradient, this plug-in is very ideal to create textures using blots.

Color MegaMix

A plug-in to replace colors in Photoshop.

Simply select the source colors & the target to replace them.

Eraser Genuine

It enables you to erase certain parts of images by:

• asking you the color to delete
• asking you the color to keep

By playing with the tolerance, you can decide how sharp the erasing will be. Check also Eraser Classic.

Fine Threshold

Rather than the standard threshold in Photoshop, this plug-in has anti-aliased & sharper results.

Flat Median

The plug-in has few advantages over the regular median effect.

Flatness can be controlled, it is isotropic & effect can be applied both vertically and horizontally.

Icon Plug-in For Photoshop

It becomes possible to import & export .ico files with Photoshop.

It supports multi-format icons, transparency and semi-transparency and allows making icons, which are compatible with Microsoft Windows XP and Vista.

The plug-in also supports non-standard icons of different sizes and color resolutions, including monochrome, 16 colors, 256 colors, 24-bit True Color, and 32-bit True Color with semi-transparency.

PhotoFreebies

A set of free Photoshop plug-ins to perform photo manipulations.

Plug-ins included are:

• B/W
• Desaturation Gradient
• Histo Fix
• Remove Transparency
• Sepia
• Luma Negative
• Chroma Negative
• RGB2YCC and YCC2RGB
• RGB2HSL and HSL2RGB

DeNoise – Noise Reduction

This plug-in has 4 noise reduction algorithms:

• ow-pass
• bilateral
• adaptive bilateral
• low frequency.

These methods can used separately or in combination to get the maximum result.

Harmonix

Play with 10 harmonic frequencies of a line to create waveforms of any kind.

Greyscaler

With 3 sliders, every channel can be controlled & there are controls for contrast, brightness and depth.

Technicolor

To create a retro film effect, apply this filter which imitates the old 2-color Technicolor process.

Beautifier

A plug-in for softening & enriching images to make them pop.

You can create flattering soft-focus, high-key and infra-red simulation effects.

Bleach Bypass

The bleach bypass technique is skipping the partial / complete bleaching stage during the processing of a colour film. This prevents the silver from being removed from the negative, and the result is a contrasty image with muted colours.

The plug-in makes it so easy to apply the effect.

Weaver

Creates a weave effect. An useful plug-in specially for pattern design.

SuperPNG

This Photoshop plugin is faster than Adobe's own PNG plug-in and saves considerably smaller PNGs.

xMeta

A set of 3 plug-ins for exporting metadata from Photoshop in raw binary form.

It can export:

•  ICC Profiles
• EXIF camera data
• IPTC press information 

Julia World

Julia 's curves are a family of mathematical curves (fractals) renowned for their beauties.

This plug-in is extremely simple : to track down an interesting curve, use the Julia control or press the random button (that's all !). Besides, it allows endless zooming, to customize colours, and to save settings.

Melt

Apply deformations on images with size, intensity, and aspect ratio of waves to get melting effects.

Projection

Using various perspective effects, you can tile images in infinite space (copy or mirror mode), or to repeat edges.

Posterizer

Add a poster-like effect to your images by playing with the luminosity and the hue

Autointerlace

Create interlace effects, just like a TV screen easily to create a techno look.

j2k

A Photoshop plug-in for reading/wiriting JPEG 2000 files.

Free Photoshop Plug-ins By Richard Rosenman

Richard Rosenman is presenting 24 free Photoshop plug-ins including:

• 3D Sphere Generator
• Color Bar Generator
• Grid Generator
• & much more..

Other Free Photoshop Plug-ins

• Plug-ins by Xero Graphics
• Almathera plug-in collection
• Filters by Filter Factory
• L&K filters
• BPelt.com's Photoshop plug-ins
• Plug-ins by Forensic Science Resources
• Topaz DeJPG

Do you know of other free & quality Photoshop plug-ins? Please share them in the comments & I'll be happy to update the list.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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>

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