PHOTOSHOP PLUGINS

10 Free Plug-ins to Enhance Photoshop
ARTICLE DATE:  06.27.06

By  Jeremy Atkinson, ExtremeTech

Whether you’re talking about a browser or an advanced 3D graphics modeler, plug-ins are a way to get more punch out of your application. And when it comes to upgrading a program’s usability, Photoshop boasts one of the largest collections of plug-ins out there.

While some have a registration fee and others are offered free by Adobe or independent developers, Photoshop plug-ins do a variety of things, such as creating new image effects or performing actions that might otherwise be impossible. Although Photoshop has a wealth of built-in features, designers and power users sometimes want more, and some plug-ins can help out novices who may otherwise have to wrestle with a confusing series of menus or dialog boxes.

We’ve assembled our top 10 favorite Photoshop plug-ins, all of which fall within the filters category—by far the most extensive group of plug-ins. Filters are pretty easy to set up in Photoshop. All you have to do is install or copy the filter in Photoshop’s Filter folder, and then they’ll load whenever Photoshop boots. They can be quickly accessed under the Filters menu.

Our test machine is a PC running Windows XP and Photoshop CS1. All plug-ins we tested are Windows-compatible, and most are Mac OS–compatible too. Many of these filters can also be used for older versions of Photoshop, and even other graphics apps such as Paint Shop Pro or PhotoPaint. The benefit of running a filter on an older version of Photoshop is that you do a better job at extending its capabilities, even if Adobe added those features in later releases. —Continue Reading…

L’amico Perro Luce (Light Effects)

A great effect you can add to pictures is a light effect, such as by having beams of light shine from a given source in your image. In some cases, this can be done by going through a series of steps in Photoshop. If you download Luce from Antonio Perricone, this becomes much easier.

As with many filter plug-ins, Luce opens up its own window from which you can adjust and modify parameters.

From here you can do a variety of things to your image, such as adjust the magnitude of light, the color of the image, etc. Here’s an average-looking picture of some clouds.

Looks like the sun might be hiding behind those clouds, so maybe we should convey that a bit more.

You can specify the location of the light source in Luce, which we obviously pinpointed to be behind those clouds. In addition to this, you can also add beams of light to emanate from that light source. A great and photographic effect.

You can also adjust the color of the picture to add different moods. —Continue Reading…

Flaming Pear

Flaming pear has a robust selection of plug-ins for both Mac and PC, most of which are commercial. We decided to check out their free package that includes a healthy list of plug-ins: Some are great, some not, some you should gloss over. We’ve highlighted some that we found were pretty useful.

Accessed from the filter menu in Photoshop, Flaming Pear offers free plug-ins aplenty:

Using this image of a supercomputer, we tinkered around with the different filters to see what cool things might show up.

To add this trippy color to our supercomputer, we used the Lab > haRGB plug-in:

The plug-ins also do a good job using filters that interchange colors:

The Kyoto Color filters brings up a menu where you can adjust hue, saturation, and more. There’s also a pull-down menu entitled “Glue” that includes about 50 other image effects you can add to your picture. There’s also a random select tool that jumps from one setting to the next if you’d rather have the computer tinker around with different settings for you.

To download the free Mac- and Windows-compatible plug-ins, venture towards the bottom of the flaming pear download page and select free plug-ins. —Continue Reading…

Dust and Scratch Removal Utility

While dust and scratches can be ironed out with several Photoshop tools such as the clone tool, it doesn’t hurt to experiment with a program that is exclusively designed to fix those quirks for you. If you’re Photoshop kung-fu isn’t strong, this filter is great to have around.

Straight from Polariod.com, this handy Dust and Scratch Removal Utility takes out those pesky dust and scratches that can give an old photo a black eye. The utility is offered for both Mac and Windows.

Launching the plug-in will open up its own utility with settings at your control.

Like some of these filters, the program will automatically adjust the image for you, while often leaving you with controls to adjust the initial modification. The default modification was a bit too much for us, so we eased down the sensitivity. Our Photograph, for instance, of this exciting Sonos ZonePlayer 80 had several scratches, but the utility would rectify any quirk too well to the point of rubbing off the button labels. After easing the sensitivity, we found a happy medium. Selecting “Adaptive Filtering” fixed this problem nicely.

Here we have the original picture, the automatic adjustment pic, and our final version that we tweaked on our own. Notice how the middle pic has some of its labels cleaned off. Oops.