HDR Sharpener is a free Photoshop plugin that lets you easily create HDR-like effects. Use it to increase the dynamic range of the image and. A comprehensive list of free Photoshop plugins for creative photo effects, Mockplus iDock is compatible with Adobe Photoshop CC and newer. Yes, Adobe Photoshop CC is outstanding on its own. Ink is one of the best free Photoshop plugins on this list. It allows designers to.
 
 

25+ Best Free Photoshop Plugins | Design Shack

Magic Enhancer helps you improve your photos by adjusting lightness, contrast and color balance. The color temperature control helps to fix color balance defects easily. This free Photoshop plugin has a user-friendly interface that lets you keep an eye on the result via the histogram.

Buying guide The best photo-editing laptops opens in new tab. This free Photoshop plugin corrects the barrel and pin-cushion distortions that many zoom camera lenses produce. To use it, simply move the sliders to the left to correct barrel distortion, and to the right to correct pin-cushion distortion. Absolute Color is based on a hue wheel, subdivided into six sectors of 60 degrees each.

With this free Photoshop plugin, you can choose a sector and restrict all the tints within an image to that sector. This free Photoshop plugin applies a gradient blur that can help you focus an image onto its main subject. You can control the blur’s starting position and strength by using the sliders provided.

A preview mask can be displayed, and you can choose between a horizontal, vertical and radial blur. In some ways, it can be considered an improvement on the native noise reduction tool in Photoshop.

The filter comes bundled with a Smooth Area Detector. You can use this accessory filter with the suggested Photoshop Actions included in a downloadable zip file. This free Photoshop plugin processes a local equalization of the luminosity of every pixel, with a matrix of 17×17 pixels. From an artistic point of view, local equalization can be interesting if you wish to stress the aspect of a given texture, and can provide a highly creative result.

This process can be also used to analyze an image where certain details are barely perceptible. This free Photoshop plugin applies a soft focus effect, which is often useful in portraits or fashion photography. It includes controls to adjust the softness, the overall strength of the effect, and the blending mode of the overlaid blurred image. Fotomatic is a collection of eight plugin filters for use with Photoshop or compatible host applications bit hosts only.

Techni-X will bleach out most of the mid-tone grays, leaving crisp, dark blacks and bright, clean whites. It will produce clear black and white images with limited tones, which are suitable for cheap reproduction via the office photocopier, or when published in newsprint. NightScope adds a basic night-vision effect to your images.

It first removes all color from the picture and gives a very slight blur, to indicate the camera is trying hard to focus in a low-light situation. Pseudo-IR produces a similar look as to when you use traditional black and white infra-red film.

SkyGrad is for tinting the sky area of your photographs. It’s ideal if you need to change the “mood” of your scene, brighten up a dull day, or make a darker overcast sky for dramatic effect.

BW-Plus quickly turns your color images into grayscale, but with the added option of using a colored optical lens filter as you would in traditional black and white photography. FastFix helps you quickly access the most common image enhancement controls though one easy-to-use dialog. A simple but surprisingly useful filter that will help you fix many of your common photographic problems. Composer has four distinct commands to help you stay in control of your document.

Kaleidoscope 2. It includes three creative effects. Mirror is a traditional effect; consecutive sectors are symmetrical. Copy takes a sectors and repeat it; transition between consecutive sectors is antialiased. And Blend turns the complete image several times and constructs a blend. This free Photoshop plugin allow you to create a halftone effect using any image with a single click. It installs in minutes and provides easy halftones from there on.

Buying guide The best photo editing tools and accessories opens in new tab. Retrodots is a nifty Photoshop plugin for generating dot grids, which can be based on selections. Eraser Classic allows you to erase a given color with ease. It’s simple to use: all you need to do is activate the eyedropper, select the color directly in the preview window, and adjust the tolerance to your preferences.

This will then enable you to remove all instances of that color in your image. It also lets you open PSDs created by the newest versions of Photoshop from within older Photoshop versions that cannot read them directly. Perhaps its most important use, though, is it can often recover image layers from corrupted PSD files that Photoshop won’t open. If Photoshop opens with a damaged file, this plugin recovers a more intact image.

As its name suggests, this free Photoshop plugin lets you create dramatic shadow effects. It enables you to control shadow length, opacity and angle, as well as choose between a dark or light ‘shadow’ effect, with an option between a flat effect or a gradient shadow.

This can be a particularly impressive way to make text stand out. Color MegaMix 1. It is based on two rows of colors: eight source colors and eight target colors. Using this data, the plugin completely reconstructs an image’s color space. This free Photoshop plugin contains 69 image effects within nine effect groups. These include filters for color adjustment, artistic effects, colorful gradients, patterns, warping images, adding noise effects, encrypting and decrypting images, zoom effects, mirroring and paint effects, as well as natural effects like lightning, tornado and polar lights.

It has a Play button for animations with random parameters and a Jump button for random effects. You get a choice of various blend modes and more than presets included, with an included brightness slider. Unlike the traditional threshold command of Photoshop, Fine Threshold allows you to quickly get sharp anti-aliased shapes. This free Photoshop plugin works particularly well with scanned logos. This can be useful if you wish to reproduce a logo for a website.

Buying guide Best monitors for photo editing opens in new tab. The Craquelure 3D Photoshop plugin is a filter that creates a wide range of craquelure effects.

The filter is useful in designing abstract patterns, decorative surfaces and construction materials. Two independent craquelure layers can be controlled to achieve a variety of texture effects, from etched metal and silk plaster to melted glass and water ripples. A random settings generator helps you to quickly and easily produce unlimited variations of craquelured surfaces.

This free Photoshop plugin creates an effect that imitates hand-woven fabric. There are two main controls.

Size Range gives you control over the size range of the weave, and Size dictates how much detail you’ll lose from the original image. The Sinedots plugin for Photoshop uses simple sinus calculations to generate interesting patterns.

The V2 of the plugin includes enhanced functions, including color support, blend modes, more control parameters, bit support and enhanced software compatibility. Note that this free Photoshop plugin is for Windows only.

This Photoshop plugin generates blots to form nice, seamless textures. Version 2 has three modes. Normal is the simplest mode: blots combine the background color and the foreground color. Camouflage mode allows you to stack blots of different colors, to obtain a camouflage texture.

And Gradient mode uses the Gradient Map effect to create gradient blots. Water Ripples is a free Photoshop-compatible plug-in filter. It creates realistic water ripple effects, and has numerous options as well as a 3D function.

The random settings generator produces unlimited variations of rippled surfaces. Flat Median is a median-like effect that allows you to control level of flatness. At low levels of flatness the result will look like a regular blur, while at high levels, the result will have more contrast. It’s isotropic, much like gaussian blur. Additionally, you can apply the effect in both horizontal and vertical directions.

Jama 3D is a compact and easy to use way to create corrugated and cellular-like patterns from 2D images. You can easily make various bricks and herring bone textures. Sequenced filtering produces bizarre, often quite artistic deformations of the original picture, such as crumpled paper effect, etc. Using different 2D shapes on a transparent layer produces complex 3D border effects. The edge antialiasing option improves the dithering. Free Photoshop plugin Gradient Smithy allows you to control any color and its luminosity within a gradient.

Well, the Layer Batch panel can reduce some of your workload. Not only can it batch rename layers as needed, but it can also batch process layer transformations, apply effects and actions to each layer separately, and even let you select layers by type. A plugin that does one thing well is just enough. All it does is rename layers, all at once, and does it well. Of particular interest to nerds like me is that you can use Regex to add variables to your layer-renaming scheme.

So give that a look sometime. Any designer who has worked with Photoshop knows that one of the more annoying things you might have to do is create a grid using the guide feature. Well, GuideGuide is a simple plugin that can easily set up guides, grids, and calculate everything for you.

Pick how many columns and rows you want, set your gutters, and forget about it. Dealing with the awful blur and degradation of enlarged photos is even worse. Well, the team behind Blow Up 3 has found a way to take your photos and make them bigger.

Edges stay fairly sharp, the photos remain relatively clear, and it all happens in a click or two. It will help you better understand your layers. It can show you, in a single glance, how big a layer is, what colors are in a vector object, the full list of text options on a text layer, and more. Just select your layer, and check the popup.

Okay, so this is a no-brainer for most photographers, but many newbies might not know about it. It lets you edit RAW files. When editing a RAW file, you can change its colors, brightness, contrast, and more without actually destroying any data.

You can even add some basic effects, then come back and make changes to your photo any time while never losing the original. This quick and easy and free!

It comes with adjustment layers that allow you to tweak the look and colors of your composite image easily. Something that defies normal, natural color schemes and structures. Well yes. The point is to play around and make something of your own by trial and error. You can combine all the effects you want to create one that is uniquely yours.

Go on! Filter Forge aims for quality and quantity, with over 13, photo effects and realistic textures. Just going through all the options could take you a month or more. These effects are specifically for use with photos, meant to make them look old but not so weathered.

They still look cool, though. God bless DeviantArt and all the people on it. And indeed, it does add a touch of blue-tinted drama to any photo. Take a lot of travel photos? Fancy yourself an influencer, perhaps? Wanderlust is a Photoshop action designed to apply a slightly moody, somewhat nostalgic effect to any outdoor photo.

Topaz Studio 2 is a collection of advanced and beautiful photo effects, all of which are good. And well, if you want to use any of them, you have to get them all. But I wanted to showcase the beautiful black and white effects specifically. These manage to retain a lot of photographic detail, even as you increase the contrast. Simply put, this black and white plugin looks great. This one looks great, even if very few comics have ever used oil-painted art. Coming much closer to authenticity, the Real Paint FX action also turns photos into paintings.

Just, you know, in a regular painting style… but they look fantastic. Continuing on our photos-to-paintings theme, the Watercolor action does what it says in the title. This action will fix that for you. Same deal as the snow action, but with rain. As seen in the example, you can even make it rain indoors.

Lastly, we have a fantastic-looking effect that turns people and anything else you like into creatures that are… part ink, I guess? Look, I dunno, it just looks really cool. See for yourself:. There are three different ways to install a plugin for Photoshop, each of them pretty simple. You can access this from the Creative Cloud desktop app. From there, search through your options, click on the one you want, and go. Some of the larger, more popular plugins have their own installers.

In these cases, you just download the installers, run them, and follow the instructions. Many will even detect your current installation of Photoshop and do most of the work. If you installed Photoshop somewhere else… look there. This is by no means a complete list of all the best plugins, filters, and smart actions you can find. The Photoshop community is huge, with some people giving away resources for free and others making a living by selling them.

But these are the ones I found most interesting, at least for now.