• Best Photoshop Plugins For Wedding Photographers
• Photoshop Plugins For Photographers
• Best Plugins For Photoshop

As Adobe’s Creative Cloud continues to grow, so does its most loved software, Photoshop. Over the years, Photoshop has single-handedly expanded its offering of creative tools to thousands of people across the globe, serving all types of industries from photography and design to forensics and astronomy. The introduction of Photoshop plugins over the years has allowed users the ability to do one of two things:. Do something that Photoshop couldn’t. Do something that Photoshop already did, only better (arguably). Website Plugins.

Sure, in today’s world you can have a new website up in less than an hour by using services like Wordpress or Squarespace. However, not too long ago, making a website was a daunting task. Then came a Photoshop plugin called 'Site Grinder' by Media Lab. This plugin allowed users the ability to create fully functional websites right out of Photoshop. It worked by simply designing your website in Photoshop and re-naming each layer with a very specific extension.

The extension essentially told the Site Grinder how to program that function for web use upon exporting your design. The plugin eventually vanished. MediaLab closed its doors back in 2014. Caudet acquired an exclusive license to the source code so they could continue developing newer versions of the plugin. Masking Plugins. Years ago, cutting out hair in Photoshop was a retoucher's nightmare. Of course, there was always the tried and true channels method for those who knew how to use it.

Eventually, Adobe introduced Refine Edge. This changed the game for a lot of people. You could start with a basic selection, then use it to create a much better selection. Outside of Adobe, there were other companies creating masking plugins that promised a simpler approach to complex masking. Topaz Labs introduced and OnOne Software introduced.

Both software companies had great demos that made masking look so easy! But are these plugins still relevant with the introduction of Adobe’s new masking interface in the 2015.5 release? Over the years, there have been tons of Photoshop plugins from companies like Nik Software, Topaz Labs, and On1 Software. Adobe even created a plugin called that lets you create your own custom panels right inside of Photoshop. Let’s not forget new ones like, which allows you to bring detailed, royalty-free 3D models into Photoshop. These are just a few examples of popular plugins. Do you still use Photoshop Plugins? If so, what do you like to use and why? Some of my go-to plugins include and Color Effex Pro in the, which is now free! I’d love to hear your thoughts!

I have purchased them all. Used them for about a month, OK, maybe two months. And then set them aside and never went back. The 'canned' looks never did anything for me, I preferred to let each image speak for itself. The 'helpful' items have been slowly replaced by better and better capabilities in Photoshop and Lightroom.

And that about kills 90% of the functionality of these plugins. But again, this is as a photographer that ONLY uses Photoshop and Lightroom for enhancing raw images. I don't import 3D models, I don't animate images (ok, maybe the occasional gif, or Cinemagraph if you're feeling fancy), but mostly simple adjustments, merge to panorama, etc. And honestly, I think they made me lazy when I was using them because of the quick try this look, how 'bout this one, maybe this one, try something different. Although if your thing is adding borders and making images look 'old' and giving them that 'film' feel (.shudder.), then by all means, go for it. If you are looking to develop a 'look' I would suggest throwing all of your plugins away and instead play with your camera.

Get a look you like right, or as close as you can in camera, and then play with Lightroom, and if you need a little more than that, use Photoshop. I'm going to shut up now. Because I am so far into the realm of opinion and my own style, and at the end of the day, whatever works for you! Above all, KEEP CREATING!!!!! I have quite a few plugins myself that I've used over the years.

It's definitely easy to over do it. I have found that the best way to use plugins, is very subtly. For me personally, I use very few plugins these days, however there are a couple of plugins that I really really like. I know that there are tons of ways to sharpen in Photoshop, but there is just something about Topaz Detail that I absolutely love. You get a lot of control. As for color grading, sometimes I'll use Color Effex Pro to enhance colors, but most of the time I like to use Curves adjustments or LUTs in Photoshop. Although I have masking plugins, 99% of the time I'm using Photoshop's masking features or Channels.

Overall, companies who make this software are really great at marketing it and making you feel like 'I have to have that plugin.' I think a lot of people fall into the trap of thinking that a 1 click filter is going to solve their problems. But when used right, the results can be pretty great. Thanks for the comment Andrew! Royi, I really dig Topaz Detail it because it gives you way more control than photoshop does over sharpening your images.

It allows you the ability to sharpen highlights and shadows separately as well as an overall sharpen. It also lets you sharpen small, medium and large details individually. It's really a control thing for me.

I just really love Topaz Detail. I would recommend checking out the trial version: The only other sharpening plugin I've tried is Nik (Google) Sharpener Pro, but in my opinion, it just doesn't have as much control as Topaz. I think the one area where plug-ins are still relevant are with film emulation (Exposure, Nix's errrr. Googles Silver Effects Pro, etc.) Yes you can achieve these color grades and black and whites in PS but the grain and control of grain is unique.

Also the ability to see different tonality on the fly without having to create it from scratch is great. You can always go back and do it by hand if you want. I find having a visual starting point much better to then adjust. The curve manipulation also still seems a bit more easy handed particularly in Exposure when color grading.

Best Photoshop Plugins For Wedding Photographers

I completely agree, it's really great to be able to see the adjustments of these filters on the fly. Which is one of the reasons Totally Rad took some of their most loved Photoshop actions and introduced them into the Rad Lab plugin. As far as film emulation goes, if you haven't already, you should check out some of the LUTs available as adjustment layers in Photoshop. Adobe has made some pretty nice Fuji film emulations right inside of Photoshop that give some really nice results. Thanks for the comment! I'm a photojournalist - and speed is often a big consideration. I love using NIK contrast tools in Color Efex Pro 4, and the isolation tools in Viveza 2 are also often better than dodging.

Lightroom still has some issues with metadata, so I typically don't use that tool. However, I'm worried about NIK not being updated. I've recently started using a 4k laptop, and the text is soooo small on NIK that if I didn't know where things were, I'd be hard pressed to find them. Adobe just recently updated Bridge so at least it's usable now. @Pete - Very interesting your comments on the scanning issue. I made my experiences too with this and can fully confirm what you write.

Scanning film negatives and diapositives is a very time consuming task. Every method that helps to limit the time of its process is welcome. What gear and scan software are you working with? I made good experiences with my old Nikon Coolscan V and Silverfast.

In most of the cases I am able to handle noise reduction sufficiently even in this first step of scanning. Thank you for your comprehensive article - I fully believe plugins are still relevant. And capable of doing things Photoshop can't even come close to! Not just Photoshop - Even After Effects is built upon the thousands of custom plugins written for it. I've been developing professional Photoshop plugins that have become very popular, aimed at 3D artists and photographers for over a decade. In particular, Ultraflares - has become a best seller for photorealistic lens flares.

I also have many freeware ones that I've contributed to the community. Feel free to check them out at.

Share:. By Jeremy H. 25 Professional and Incredibly Powerful Photoshop Plugins Freebies are awesome, and design blogs are full of them, but sometimes you need a professional tool to handle professional tasks. There are a wealth of extremely powerful and high quality photoshop tools that can dramatically improve your workflow and are worth every penny you have to spend to get them. Today we’ll look at a number of the best tools available for making color adjustments, adjusting focus, enlarging images, transforming layers in 3D, reducing noise, creating textures, applying complex masks, and even taking that PSD into full-blown HTML. Color and Exposure “Over 500 analog techniques and organic looks are back like cross processing, Polaroid and vintage Daguerreotype. There is careful research under the hood, but the controls are simple so you can focus on the creative choices.

The result is a photo that looks like it was made by a human, not a computer.” Price: $249.00. “Naturally occurring depth of field has extremely complex optical characteristics. It cannot be simply simulated through the use of a standard blur filter. Lens size, subject distance, aperture shape, lens curvature, film grain, spherical aberration, chromatic aberration, lens asymmetry, transparency, light refraction, motion blur and much more must be taken into account in order to achieve an accurate and convincing depth of field effect. DOF PRO carefully takes into consideration all of these aspects in order to produce the highest quality depth of field output possible.” Price: $99.99.

Enlargement “Blow Up 2 is a Photoshop plug-in that produces enlargements dramatically sharper than any other software, especially Photoshop! Blow Up uses an innovative algorithm that temporarily converts pixels to a vector representation which results in perfectly smooth, crisp edges. Simulated texture and film grain keep photos looking natural even in extreme enlargements. Blow Up can even clean up JPEG compression artifacts when a client insists on using a low quality source image from the Web.” Price: $249.00. Page Curl Pro 2.2 is an extremely powerful and high quality Photoshop plugin, which will definitely boost your productivity and creativity. This Photoshop filter lets you not only bend the image, using two types of bending (curling and folding), but also texturize it (using the bump maps), orient it in 3D space (including the perspective distortions) and obtain total control over the process of lighting the image (including the option of dropping inner shadows).

Photoshop Plugins For Photographers

All this is possible thanks to the all new and unrivalled engine of this plug-in. Price: $49.95. Noise Reduction “Noiseware is a high-performance noise suppression software tool designed to decrease or eliminate noise from digital photo or scanned images. Unlike most image processing software techniques that utilize simple methods (such as median filters) to treat digital noise in images, Noiseware features a sophisticated yet fast noise filtering algorithm. Using the adaptive noise profile capability and sharpening function, Noiseware greatly reduces the visible noise while keeping the details in the images. ” Price: $49.95. “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.

Best Plugins For Photoshop

This extraction process creates what is known as a mask–essentially a black and white cutout. White mask areas are extracted, black areas not, and gray areas in between represent a level of transparency. Once a mask is extracted, the foreground object can be seamlessly composed onto a new background in Adobe Photoshop as well as apply filter and image corrections only within the area defined by the mask.” Also check out from the same developer. Price: $150.00.