Free Plugins For Photoshop
Add even more capability to your Adobe Photoshop software. Find the latest plug-ins available from third-party developers.
For tips on installing third-party plug-ins or to identify and troubleshoot issues with plug-ins in Photoshop, see Photoshop plug-ins troubleshooting.
The Adobe Add-ons website features hundreds of plug-ins and extensions from Adobe and third-party developers for Adobe products. The Add-ons site features Photoshop plug-ins and extensions (both paid and free) that can help you create special image effects, create a more efficient workflow, and use many other handy tools.
| Plug-in | Description |
| Exposure | Featuring the creative focus effects of Bokeh, and a slew of new film presets and textures. |
| Snap Art | Transform your photographs into beautiful works of art that look they were made by a human, not a computer. |
| Blow Up | Keep photos crystal clear during enlargement. |
| Eye Candy | Render realistic effects such as Fire, Chrome, Animal Fur, Smoke, Reptile Skin, and the new Lightning. |
- Help & support
| Plug-in | Description |
| Engraver III | Engraver III plugin for lets you turn any picture into an impressive old-style engraving. |
| Digitalizer II | Digitalizer II turns any picture into a set of symbols, digits or meaningful text. |
| RichText | RichText plug-in lets you add multi-line text and/or paragraphs to Photoshop compositions and apply effects for impact and interest. |
| DigitalChaos | DigitalChaos lets your create random patterns consisted from symbols and digits. |
| IcePattern | IcePattern creates beautiful designs of winter ice patterns on window glass. |
| LensPro III | LensPro III creates realistic images of various lenses, crystals and glass surfaces |
- Help & support
| Plug-in | Description |
| Cutline | Cutline is a plug-in for creating engraving and woodcut effects. |
| EtchTone | EtchTone is a plug-in that simulates the look of a steel etch starting with gray⁄color photograph or illustration. |
| LensDoc | LensDoc is a plug–in for correcting lens distortions including barreling, perspective, pin-cushioning, & rotation distortions easily. |
| Perspective | Perspective is a plug–in that provides the capability to change the current view or “perspective” of an image to any point in three-dimensional space through the utilization of a user-friendly interface. |
| ScatterLight | ScatterLight is a plug-in that produces a broad scope of realistic patterned and diffusion lens effects. |
| Screens | Screens is a plug-in that converts grayscale images into a wide variety of different line art screens from 15 to 400 lpi. With features like mezzotints, sharp contrast mezzograms, mezzoblends, ellipses, lines, circles, spokes, waves, or any blended combination. |
| Shadow | Shadow is an advanced shadowing plug-in that uses 3-D geometry to cast realistic shadows. |
| StippleArt | StippleArt is a plug-in that converts grayscale and color images into formal stipple art or artistic dot patterns. The result, a pure black-and-white stipple drawing or an artistic color dot interpretation. |
- Help & support
| Plug-in | Description |
| Mystical Ultimate Bundle Gen2 | Mystical Ultimate Bundle Gen2 is an integrated bundle of products that work together to overcome challenges encountered by the issues with post production digital photo enhancement |
| PhotoGraphic Edges Ultimate Bundle Gen2 | PhotoGraphic Edges Ultimate Bundle Gen2 includes over 10,000 frame, edge, and border photo effects. |
| DreamSuite Ultimate Bundle Gen2 | DreamSuite Ultimate Bundle Gen2 is our best product for Graphic Artists. Containing a total of 36 powerful filters fulfilling the needs of the Digital Photographer, the Graphics Artists and Web Designer in one powerful tool. |
| AutoMagic Ultimate Bundle Gen2 | AutoMagic Ultimate Bundle Gen2 is an amazing suite of 52 filters giving any type photographer whether a professional, intermediate photographer, or a beginner, some of the most comprehensive artistic effects allowing any user the ability to create a large array of digital artwork in one of the many artistic genres. |
- Help & support
| Plug-in | Description |
| Geographic Imager | Tools to import, edit, manipulate and export geospatial images such as aerial and satellite imagery. |
- Help & support
| Plug-in | Description |
| ParticleShop | Create one-of-a-kind effects with ParticleShop, a powerful new Photoshop brush plug-in powered by Painter. |
- Help & support
| Plug-in | Description |
| Digimarc® Barcode | Digimarc® Barcode for Digital Images Plug-in for Adobe Photoshop is intended exclusively for photographers to protect ownership of images. |
- Help & support
| Plug-in | Description |
| Backdrop Designer | Create digital backgrounds for photography and other design mediums. |
| Beauty Box Photo | Quickly and easily erase skin blemishes and wrinkles, even out skin tones, and reduce shine. |
| Primatte Chromakey | Fast auto-masking for green screen photography. |
| Texture Anarchy | Texture Anarchy is a set of filters for creating textures and borders |
| ToonIt! | An easy way to give your photos that sought-after cartooning look. |
| Plug-in | Description |
| DFT | DFT (aka Digital Film Tools) is the definitive digital toolbox meant to simulate optical camera filters, specialized lenses, film stocks and grain, lens flares, optical lab processes, color correction, keying, and compositing as well as natural light and photographic effects. |
| EZ Mask | EZ Mask is an easy to use interactive image masking tool capable of extracting almost any object in an image—even if you are dealing with fine hair detail, smoke, or reflections. |
| Film Stocks | Film Stocks is a unique filter that simulates 288 different color and black-and-white still photographic film stocks, motion picture films stocks, and historical photographic processes. |
| Light | Light can be added to a scene where none existed before just as if you were adding light at the time of shooting. |
| PhotoCopy | PhotoCopy creates a photographic reproduction of a printed or graphic work made with a process in which a new image is formed by the action of proprietary image analysis, color, texture, and light. |
| Power Matte | Power Matte is an easy to use interactive image matting tool capable of extracting almost any object in an image—even if you are dealing with fine hair detail, smoke, or reflections. |
| Power Stroke | Power Stroke introduces a simple, interactive stroke-based interface to quickly and intuitively perform targeted adjustments. |
| Rays | Create stunning and realistic light ray effects quickly and easily |
| reFine | reFine performs selective sharpening, detail enhancement, edge aware smoothing, cartoon, and pencil effects. |
| zMatte | zMatte quickly and simply creates mattes with minimal parameters even if you are dealing with fine hair detail, smoke, or reflections. |
| Tiffen DFX | Simulating 2,000+ popular Tiffen glass filters, specialized lenses, optical lab processes, film grain, exacting color correction, plus natural light and photographic effects. |
- Help & support
| Plug-in | Description |
| Analog Efex Pro | Explore the look and feel of classic cameras, films, and lenses. |
| Color Efex Pro | A comprehensive set of filters for color correction, retouching, and creative effects. |
| Silver Efex Pro | Master the art of black-and-white photography with darkroom-inspired controls. |
| Viveza | Selectively adjust the color and tonality of your images without complicated masks or selections. |
| HDR Efex Pro | From natural to artistic, explore the full potential of HDR photography. |
| Sharpener Pro | Bring out hidden details consistently with the professional's choice for image sharpening. |
| Dfine | Improve your images with noise reduction tailored to your camera. |
- Help & support
| Plug-in | Description |
| Suitcase Fusion | Organize your entire font collection into a single, searchable location with a professional font manager. |
- Help & support
| Plug-in | Description |
| Flood 2 | Create realistic watery reflections with control over waves, ripples, and perspective. Now with improved 3D realism. |
| Flexify 2 | Bend spherical panoramas into vertiginous new shapes. |
| Melancholytron | Make pictures moody, nostalgic, and somehow sad. |
| India Ink | Convert color images to unusual black-and-white halftones. Or use its color modes to produce strange etched effects. |
| SuperBladePro | The best surface and texture generator anywhere. |
| LunarCell | Instant planets. |
| Mr Contrast | Add dramatic contrast to photos and hyper-emphasize detail. |
| SolarCell | Create suns in a fantasy style. |
| Hue and Cry | Create abstract regions of color. |
| Glitterato | Stars and nebulas with lots of realism and little fuss. |
| Free Plug-ins | Ornament, ChromaSolarize, Tachyon, Ghost, Solidify, Vitriol, RGB/HSL, Circle to Square, Make Cube Tile.. |
| Plug-in | Description |
| ProEXR | Access all the capabilities of OpenEXR from within Adobe Photoshop, After Effects, and Premiere Pro using ProEXR. |
| SuperPNG | SuperPNG is a free, open source Adobe Photoshop plug-in for using PNG ('ping') files. It has more comprehensive support for the format than Photoshop's included plug-in and provides control over alpha channel handling. |
| j2k | j2k is a free Photoshop and After Effects plug-in set for reading and writing the JPEG 2000 file format, the successor to JPEG. |
NOTE: DXO has purchased the Nik Collection and has released new versions.
NOTE: Google no longer provides download links for its versions of the Nik collection. Google also no longer supports or updates its Nik plug-ins for current versions of Photoshop on current operating systems and hardware.
Customers may experience incompatibilities (including freezing and crashes) using Nik plug-ins. We recommend uninstalling problematic plug-ins.
- See: Google Nik plug-in compatibility with Photoshop - Known Issues
| Plug-in | Description |
| Analog Efex Pro | Explore the look and feel of classic cameras, films, and lenses. |
| Color Efex Pro | A comprehensive set of filters for color correction, retouching, and creative effects. |
| Silver Efex Pro | Master the art of black-and-white photography with darkroom-inspired controls. |
| Viveza | Selectively adjust the color and tonality of your images without complicated masks or selections. |
| HDR Efex Pro | From natural to artistic, explore the full potential of HDR photography. |
| Sharpener Pro | Bring out hidden details consistently with the professional's choice for image sharpening. |
| Dfine | Improve your images with noise reduction tailored to your camera. |
- Help & support
| Plug-in | Description |
| Photomatix Pro | Create HDR photos and adjust them to get the look you want, from realistic to creative, using one-click presets and a large range of settings. |
- Help & support
| Plug-in | Description |
| Portraiture | Automatic skin smoothing, healing, and enhancing effect plug-in. |
| Noiseware | Award-winning plug-in and stand-alone for photo noise reduction. |
| Realgrain | Inimitable toning, film, and grain effects plug-in. |
- Help & support
| Plug-in | Description |
| FontExplorer X | FontExplorer X is the simple, speedy way to find and organize 0003all of your fonts. |
- Help & support
| Plug-in | Description |
| Light Leaker | Now you can add authentic light leaks to any photograph with Light Leaker. |
| Spot Wash Halftone | Create professional quality halftone textured weathering, surface and tactile effects with Spot Wash Halftone. |
| Spot Wash Dirt | Create professional quality weathering, surface and tactile effects with Spot Wash Dirt. |
| Permanent Press | Create professional quality vintage offset, letterpress and silkscreen analog printing effects on any image with Permanent Press. |
| Retrographer | Create stunning and authentic vintage photography effects with Retrographer. |
| Machine Wash Deluxe | Create professional quality image texture, aging and weathering effects with our Machine Wash Deluxe. |
- Help & support
| Plug-in | Description |
| Neat Image Pro | Neat Image software is engineered to reduce the noise in your digital images. It can also minimize film grain, JPEG compression artifacts and other imperfections. |
- Help & support
| Plug-in | Description |
| ON1 Photo 10 | Our entire collection of apps are included in ON1 Photo 10. Browse, Effects, Resize, Portrait, Enhance, and Layers |
| ON1 Effects 10 | Effects 10 includes hundreds of stackable filters, presets, borders, and textures to help create your style. |
| ON1 Resize 10 | Get the highest-quality photo enlargements with Genuine Fractals® technology—patented, fractal-based interpolation algorithms—that quickly enlarge your images without loss of sharpness or detail. |
- Help & support
| Plug-in | Description |
| Portrait Pro | Photoshop plug-in to make portraits amazing. |
- Help & Support
Note:
Supports installing and loading the plug-in from the Shared Creative Cloud Location for all installed versions of Photoshop CC without having to reinstall the plug-in.
| Plug-in | Description |
| StarFilter Pro 4 | StarFilter Pro 4 to add beautiful star filter effects to your images digitally, eliminating the need for expensive glass. |
| StarSpikes Pro 4 | You can use StarSpikes Pro 4 to add sparkling star effects to your images digitally in your finishing image processing. |
- Help & support
| Plug-in | Description |
| Adjust | Watch your images come to life with dramatic contrast, incredible detail, and vivid color. |
| B&W Effects | Turn your color photos into exquisite monochrome images that will emotionally move your viewers. |
| Clarity | Clarity uses intelligent contrast technology to give your photos more punch, completely naturally. |
| Clean | Clean helps you control exactly how you want surface texture to look in your photos. |
| DeJPEG | Eliminate JPEG compression artifacts and mosquito noise. Recover image information from damaged JPEGs. |
| DeNoise | DeNoise removes distracting image noise while preserving image detail so you can shoot in any situation with confidence. |
| Detail | Crystal-clear sharpness from real image details. |
| Glow | Topaz Glow creates vibrant and beautiful images with energetic sparks of neon light. |
| Impression | Turn photos into paintings like a true artist would: by intelligently applying real brushstrokes to canvas. |
| Infocus | Get unprecedented image clarity and rescue blurred photos with image deconvolution technology. |
| Lens Effects | Virtual camera bag of realistic effects developed from real lenses and filters. |
| photoFXlab | Apply any of your Topaz effects from a searchable library. |
| Remask | Create precise selections effortlessly. |
| Restyle | Use beautiful one-click effects to infuse your images with emotion, and make your regular photos extraordinary. |
| Simplify | Turn your photos into works of art. |
| Star Effects | Create beautiful star and lighting effects |
| Texture Effects | Quickly achieve a variety of textured, toned, and lighting effects. |
- Help & support
| Plug-in | Description |
| RadLab | 30 Brand new effects plus 50 classic favorites come together in RadLab for endless creative possibilities. |
| Dirty Pictures | Dirty Pictures features 21 custom-designed image overlays that add dimension, grit, and depth to your photos. |
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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.
1. Nik Collection
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:
- Analog Efex Pro 2 — Replicates the look of classic analog cameras and film stock.
- Color Efex Pro 4 — A huge collection of filters and presets for color correction and image processing.
- Dfine 2 — High-end noise reduction, with more control than Photoshop’s built-in tools provide.
- HDR Efex Pro 2 — Create stunning but natural looking HDR photos.
- Sharpener Pro 3 — A powerful sharpening tool to bring out the subtle details in your shots.
- Silver Efex Pro 2 — Create beautiful black and white conversions.
- Viveza 2 — Selective control of tone and color for making local adjustments.
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.
2. Pexels Plugin
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. Mujhse dosti karoge hindi movie. 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.
3, ON1 Effects
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.
4. Ink
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.
5. CSS3Ps
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.
6. SuperPNG
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.
7. Fontea
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.
8. Long Shadow Generator 2
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.
9. Layrs Control 2
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:
- Layer name editor.
- Remove unused effects.
- Flatten all layer effects.
- Delete empty layers.
- Rasterize smart objects.
- Find similar files/folders.
- Convert to smart object.
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.
10. Font Awesome PS
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.
Working With Photoshop Plugins
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?
The link for Long Shadow Generator is throwing a 403 error..