means recently added.

          means that the software is available for the Macintosh.

          means that the software is available for Windows.


means very useful

means useful

means less useful

No star means that it wasn't tested yet.

Categories

From This Web Site (4)
Image Effects (48)
Photo Enhancement (34)
Web Design (6)
Patterns / Textures (5)
Painting & Drawing (3)
3D (5)
Various (24)
Image Format / Importing (17)

146 items total

From This Web Site

PhotoFreebies
... is a collection of free plugins for performing usefull photo manipulations and effects e.g. sepia effects, desaturation gradients, b/w conversion, color space transformations and many more.

Plugin Galaxy  
... is a plugin with all kinds of fantastic effects. Four of its effects (PopArt, Zoom) are free!

Harry's Filters 
... contains 69 filter effects. They include filters for changing the image color or mood, for creating artistic effects, producing colorful gradients or impressive patterns, warping images, adding special noise effects to images, encrypting and decrypting images with 64 bit keys and producing various other effects like zoom, mirror or paint effects.

HyperTyle  
... is a plugin for generating texture, surface, paint, erosion, transparency, edge, frame and shadow effects. There is a Freeware main effect in the demo version, which does not apply a watermark.

Image Effects

Mosaic & Illumination Fix Toolkit
... apply mosaic effects to images and let you fix unevenly lit photos.

FilterForge Freepacks
FilterForge will be offering so called Freepacks, which are are free Photoshop plugins based on the Filter Forge technology. Freepack 1 is a set of seven metal textures and effects. Freepack 2 contains seven photo effects, e.g. for adding sunny styles, grunge looks, color tints, age the image and more. Freepack 3 (Windows only) offers seven frame effects, e.g. a painted wooden frame or a vignette.The effects are fully adjustable and support seamless tiling. Nr. 4 of the Filter Forge Freepack (Windows only) with the subtitle "Distortions" includes 7 filters for creating distortion effects.

Pointwise Shape-Adaptive DCT
... lets you denoise grayscale and color image as well as deblock and dering JPEG files. Unfortunately we were not able to use it in Photoshop CS3 and CS4 without a crash. So be careful when using it. It may work in earlier versions of Photoshop or other compatible applications without a crash, but we cannot confirm it.

DeMoirize
The free DeMoirize plugin (for Windows) is included in pre 4.0 versions of Capture One PRO for Windows. It removes moire artifacts from images. To get the plugin you need to download e.g. Capture One PRO 3.7.9 for Windows. To install it double click SETUP.EXE in the CO PRO\DeMoirize sub folder of the downloaded .zip file. By default the Photoshop CS4 Plug-Ins folder is selected in the installer. If you use another application, you need to change the destination folder.

ASCII-art
The ASCII-art Photoshop plugin creates ASCII art pictures. It lets you define your own alphabet and use all ASCII symbols. It is not possible to change the font and its size.

Medhi Plugins
... contain 26 free Photoshop-compatible plugins that were created with Filter Meister. The plugin effects range from color effects, photo correction, transparency manipulation, distortion to grain and fractals.

Richard Rosenman Filters
... include many freeware plugins. The latest ones are: Lens FX produces 10 different distortions including more common lens effects like Punch, Push, Concave and Convex as well as more exotic ones like Wave and Ripple. Particle Pro 0.1 Beta creates animated particle effects, but it does not let you apply or save them.

Xero Plugins & Xero XL Plugins
... consist of 4 collections of up to 9 freeware plugins plus a new XL collection of five plugins. The effect range varies from color effects, art effects, grain effects to noise removal and image enhancement. It is a bit hard to get used to the pink dialog of these plugins, but otherwise they look quite useful. There are also five extra plugins for star, paint, snowflake, sparkle and tinted monochrome effects.

Cartoon Bubble
...is a a free plugin for creating cartoon word bubbles. It is also planned to make it available for Aperture.

Flatten and MultiFill
Boudewijn Pelt made two Photoshop plugins available called Flatten and MultiFill. Flatten offers a special trapping method that is used in the production of comics. MultiFill automatically fills white areas in a black-and-white image with colors. A tutorial on how to use both plugins resides on the page.

ImageSkill Displacement Map
...distorts images in an unusual way while keeping fine details . A set of displacement maps is supplied with the plugin.

Smart Refinement Filter
...from Aura Labs is a Photoshop plugin that applies sharpening, depth of field (DOF) enhancement and noise reduction. It is a beta version that is free for non-commercial use.

Optorsion & Vintage
Island Mountain Graphics offers two plugins for download that are still in development. The Optorsion plugin creates optical distortion including chromatic aberration. The Vintage Screen plugin simulates the look of an old TV-set or black and white cathode ray video monitor. There are two other plugins mentioned on the web site, but not available for download.

Pixel Bender  
The Pixel Bender plugin for Photoshop CS4 lets you develop filter effects with the help of a simple C-like language. The language is GPU-accelerated, so the filters run very fast. A dozen effects are already delivered. Pixel Bender is also supported by Adobe After Effects CS4 and Flash Player 10. Pixel Bender appears like a new and greatly enhanced version of Adobe Filter Factory, but the filters are stored as text files and there is no possibility to create plugins as with FilterFactory. For more PixelBender filters see here.

Flaming Pear Freebies  
... consists of dozens of plugins. The Rule 30 plugin produces an abstract gray pattern, Veins transforms the image into color lines that look like blood veins, the three "Gray from" plugins produce B/W images and Pixel Trash tries to imitate the computer graphics of the early 80s. The Circle to Square plugin transforms circular objects in an image into squares. The Zombie plugin gives your images a touch of horror. It works best with portraits that show eyes and teeth. Most plugins apply the effect without showing a dialog except a few plugins.

Photoshop Fun 3
... consists of 4 plugins that apply pixel snow, mirror, shadow and warping effects. You need an Adobe ID, which can be requested for free, to download them.

Stereogram Lab Filter
... allows you to generate hidden image stereograms. These autostereograms consist of a repeating pattern and only show their hidden content if you focus your eyes behind the image plane.

Mezzoforce Plugins
Mezooforce offers a few Lite versions of its commercials plugins which are limited to processing only images up to 1000 x 1000 pixel in size. In order to download them, you need to subscribe to a discussion group. The Ice 2.0 Lite plugin creates ice-like structures. Version 1.03 of the same plugin is also offered for download and does not have any size limitation. Mezzoforce MetallEaser 2 LITE adds a metallic effect to images. The Snow plugin produces snow effects and has no size limitations.

Martin Koch Plugins  
... contain three freeware plugins that produce line art and dithering effects. The Line plugin applies a 1-bit black and white horizontal or vertical line screen, Random Dither randomly dithers an image to 1-bit black and white line art and the Dither plugin uses a special dither effect that looks better than standard dithering algorithms. Finally, there is a fourth plugin that costs $10 and deletes stray dots in a line art image. The plugins only work on 8bit images.

Thedigitalartshop.com Plugins
Among various commercial plugins Thedigitalartshop.com also offers three free plugins. GREYSCALER is a kind of channel mixer for converting images to black and white. It also offers brightness and contrast sliders. IMAGE ENCODER encrypts and decrypts your images with a 24 bit key. IRIDESCENT applies a color-shift effect to your images.

AmphiSoft Filters & Photo Tinter
The Photo Tinter plugin allows extracting tone maps from existing black and white images and applying them to new images and is meant as an alternative to Photoshop's Curves filter. The AmphiSoft Filters contains both free and shareware Photoshop-compatible plugins. Included are free light versions of "Convolution shaman" and "Sorting shaman" (basic functions like blur, sharpen, edge detection and sharpening and despeckle with many extra options for image enhancement) which can be upgraded to full versions by registering. "Thread master" (cross-shaped smudge effect) and "Out of the noise (noise & diffuse effects) are free, too. The new and free Simplifier filter provides a wide range of color\shape simplification operations, resulting in "painterly" artistic effects. The shareware plugins of this package are called "Metalwork II" (metallic effects), "ArtiFactor" and "Kinetics lab" (for creating organic textures by simulating chemical reactions).

Photoshop-Scripts.com Filters - English web pages not available anymore
... offers several effect plugins, which are basically freeware and only available in Spanish language.To get access to them you need to contact the author, whose English is probably not the best. The plugins are called Watercolor, B&W, drawing, Dream, Threshold, Tone Effect, Splash, High-Key, Dynamic Color, Convolution Draw, Graduated Filter and Center Spot.

L&K Filters
The free L&K Filters consist of 14 plugins that produce various gradients and patterns, which can be useful for graphical designs.

Little Ink Pot Free Plugins
... offers some free plugins). Xpose is a simple exposure adjustment plugin. Thredgeholder provides an edge detection algorithm that turns photos into line drawings. Chalkaholic Lite is a pluginfor drawing-style effects. There is also a Pro Version which offer more possibilities.

Econym Plugins - Currently Down
... are a free collection of 11 plugins for Photoshop and compatible applications. Effects include page curls, page rolls, color posterization, color tinting and some other effects. There is also a contrast masking plugin, which renders very slowly, and two plugins for correcting the brightness and contrast of 16bit images. The plugin dialogs are a bit small and maybe a bit too colorful. Nevertheless you may find the one or other useful plugin among them.

Cybia's Works Plugins  
... are 8 plugins with simple transparency, color, edge, emboss, grain and mesh effects. The old Windows plugins of each Works series have been combined to a single plugin, which lets you select the individual filters from a drop-down menu.

Namesuppressed Design
... offers a few Photoshop-compatible plugins with simple but useful effects. The AUTOINTERLACE plugin is freeware and creates the interlace effect as seen on television screens. AUTOCHROMATIC and SOFTENER (Win only) are full-functional shareware plugins that cost only a few dollares registration fee each. Autochromatic colorizes an image with two user-definable colors and Softener adds soft, glossy effects to your images. PLAID LITE is also a inexpensive shareware plugin for creating seamless plaids and tiling tartan patterns. It extracts colors and patterns from any digital image to create a color coordinated plaid pattern. The Plaid Lite demo version is fully functional, but displays several nag screens.

GraphicXtras Gothic Plugin
... adds a dark gloomy Goth effect. Unfortunatelly it doesn't show the correct result at the default preview zoom and doesn't display a progress bar during final rendering.

Luce
... is a plugins for creating light beams known as volumetric light.

DC Filters
Improved versions of 14 of the DC Filters (for Windows) are now available. The old FilterFactory versions were recompiled with FilterMeister which made several new features possible. These 14 plugins include some nice pattern, edge and distortion effects.

Ulead Free Plugins
Ulead started offering their commercial Art Texture plugin for free some time ago. Now they also offer Particle.Plugin and the FantasyWarp plugin (for Windows) for free, too. Particle.Plugin creates eight natural particle effects, e.g. smoke, fire, bubbles, clouds and rain. FantasyWarp takes any image or selection and warps, distorts and twists it into surreal patterns. Don't miss these plugins!

EyeCandy4000 BevelBoss & MotionTrial and Splat! Edges 
The Macromedia Fireworks MX and MX 2004 trial versions contains full versions of the BevelBoss and MotionTrial plugins of Alienskin EyeCandy 4000 and the Edges plugin of Alienskin Splat!. If you are lucky you may find the Fireworks MX or MX 2004 MX trial an old magazine cover CD, but you can also download it here: http://www.soft32.com/download_351.html. After you installed it switch to the Fireworks folder and open the Plug-ins sub folder. Now copy the Splat 8bf and dll files, the EyeCandy 8bf file and the two sub folders to your default plugin folder. Open the image application you usually use to apply plugins and there they are!

Almathera Plugins
1997 Almathera developed eight Photoshop-compatible plugins. Unfortunately Almathera was closed down in the same year. Currently these plugins remain copyright but can be distributed freely in a non-commercial manner. This means that they can be used for commercial design work, but it is not allowed to sell the software itself. The Almathera plugins produce shape, bevel, halo, drop shadow, grayscale, warp, lightning and puddle effects. Although the interface is outdated and displays wrongly with "Large Fonts", you will certainly find one or two interesting effects in this package.

AutoFX Mosaic  
... released a second freeware plugin and standalone application called Mosaic. Mosaic makes your photos look as if they were created out of a mosaic tile. Photo-realistic depth, variable tile size and color options give this effect an infinite number of looks. Included with Mosaic are effect presets, a PDF manual and technical/customer support. The plugin requires a serial number which can be requested for free from AutoFX.

AutoFX Dreamy Photo  
... is a free Photoshop-compatible plugin and standalone tool from AutoFX that adds a soft-focus effect to photos. The effect is configurable with seven controls and by using presets. The interface looks like that of AutoFX's commercial DreamSuite product. The package also includes a PDF manual and promises technical and customer support. Dreamy Photo requires a serial number which can be obtained by submitting your e-mail address from a web form.

Filter Meister
... is a sophisticated filter plugin development tool. Beside the filter development plugin itself there are some interesting Photoshop-compatible plugins included that were created with Filter Meister. There is also a large library of source codes which can even be used with the unregistered version of Filter Meister and applied to the image. Among the code are e.g. Adjust Saturation, AFH Beveler 3.0, Patches Factory (animated), Box Blur, Nirvana, Fractalism and many other examples. Filter Meister is free to use, but if you want to compile your own plugins, you have to register it.

DragonFly's Plugins
"Sinedot Shader" creates shaded 3D sinus curves, "Shear" does a simple shear effect which means that you can specify a line along which the image is than shifted and "Retrodots" places holes in a symmetrical pattern on an image. The new "Sinedots II" now includes enhanced antialias, color support, blend modes, more parameters for enhanced control, 16bit support and enhanced compatibility. Two import plugins for .ico and .cur files are available there, too.

VDL Adrenaline Plugins
The Adrenaline series consists of several free plugins and two commercial ones.The "Harmonix" plugin creates wave lines known from sound editing tools. With the "Camouflage" plugin you can generate all kinds of army-style and animal camouflage patterns. "NightVision" creates realistic night-goggle effects including enhancement, anti-aliased interlacing, signal noise and feedback. "Snowscape" lets you add a snow effect to a layer. "Snowflakes" adds snowflakes of any size and shape to your images.

The Yellownail Collection
consists of 32 Photoshop plugins with the names: 13area, 1stImpact, 3DTile, Adjuster, Alchemist Pro, Ancient Paintings, BambooCraft, Bedlam, Bokassher, ButColor, ButtonMagic, ClassicalGold, CoolColor, CrazyTile, CuteMozaic, CycloidDistortion, DeftMove, DemonishCell, DemonishSkin, Eloquency, Embossher, Enhancer, EqualLevel, FillHarmony, FireWork, FlowerFrame, FlushIt, FoolishStripe, Gingum. These plugins were created by a Japanese programmer and offer some interesting effects you shouldn't miss. Some of them apply directly to the image while other have a Japanese dialog.
Unfortunately getting these plugins can be a bit time consuming and exhausting, because you have to download them individually and make your way from the main web page to a description page and from there to the download page. You have to do that for each of the 32 plugins and everything is in Japanese language.

Pobelly's Plugins - Currently Down
contain four free Photoshop-compatible plugins that still look a bit experimental. The "Eliminate Whatever" plugin will change opacity based on color or brightness. "Whack and Blight" converts color images to monotone or duotone while weighting of the RGB values. "Meet the Neighbors" is a 7x7 convolution plugin for playing with different operators. Finally, "Throbber Thinger" is though to make those little animations in the corner of browser windows, therefore doing some basic rotate, copy and fade operations to individual frames of an animation.

2D HyperClouds
... is a filter plugin for generating cloud textures and plasmas. It is based on Perlin's noise functions and uses the background and foreground colors to make the clouds palette.

Mura's Filters
Pole Transform transforms an image to polar coordinates or rectangular coordinates. You might know this effect from Photoshop. Cloud produces a seamless cloud effect, Copies blends multiple copies of an image and Seamless makes an image seamless by wrapping the edges around. (Orignal website http://mura.hey.to/ does not work anymore.)

Mark's Page Curl & Remove White
A plugin that creates a page curl effect and a plugin with a transparency effect.

Primus  
... is a free feature limited version of Blade Pro. You can use it to create nice text effects or beveled and textured shapes. It offers 16 presets and a slider for adjusting the bevel height. Unfortunatelly you can't use other than the 16 textures. You need to register it (for free) before you can apply the effects.

Axion Lens Flare32 and Glow32  - Currently Down
are two plugins for Photoshop-compatible applications and trueSpace 2.

AlienSkin Xenofex 1.0   - Not available for download anymore
2 of the 16 plugins (Crumple & Stain) work in the demo version.

Fantastic Machines Tile Tools
You can get 7 of these 21 plugins for creating tileable images and textures for free.

Filter Formula Example Filters
... are some filters created with Filter Formula.

Photo Enhancement

Red Paw Media Free Plugins
Red Paw Media offers some free plugins. HotPixel is a plugin for removing hot pixel noise from digital images. Hot pixels often occur when on long exposure photos. This plugin automatically detects and removes hot pixels without degrading the image. BleachBypass simulates the traditional bleach-bypass technique, which creates desaturated, grainy and overexposed results. Beautifier creates soft-focus, high-key and infra-red effects. It is meant for portrait and landscapes photos. The Technicolor plugin simulates the 2-color Technicolor process. It makes the colors look old-style and a bit faded.

Easyfilter Plugins
The Image Adjustment plugin contains sliders for hue, saturation, lightness and contrast, and works in 8 and 16 bit RGB mode. The Color Space plugin converts from and to RGB, CMY, CMYK, HSB, HSL, Lab and LCH. The Color Converter plugin is quite similar, but also offers 17 different RGB working spaces for input and output. The Color Balance plugin is very similar to the Color Balance filter in Photoshop. It lets you change the image colors in the shadow, midtones and highlights regions separately. The Fill Frame plugin fills a uniform colored area around the image with image data. It can copy, mirror, stretch or add a stripe in order to fill the frame. Another plugin is for counting the colors of 8-bit and 16-bit/channel images.

Colormancer
...offers three free Photoshop plugins. The White Balance / Highlight Recovery plugin applies white balancing and avoids that highlights are lost during the process. The Tint plugin applies tints, bleach bypass, sepia tone and B&W conversions. It offers 11sliders for adjusting the effect. The Light version of the Boundary Noise Reduction plugin removed noise in digital photos. There is also a commercial version of it available.

ChromAcute
... is a free plugin for removing chromatic aberrations and color fringing from digital photos. It features a one-click correction of color fringing and batch processing.

Unicontel
... developed three free Photoshop filter plugins (for Windows). "Hi ISO Noise Reduction" reduces color noise in photo while respecting the contours of image objects. "EdgeCrement" increases or decreases the white/black edges in the image, which creates some kind of blur or sharpen effects. "Multiple Histogram Equalization" increases the contrast, but also produces visible artifacts. All plugins only have few options, so it is hard to properly adjust their effects.

PhotoTools 2.5 Lite and PhotoFrame 4.5 Lite
One Software offers free versions of PhotoTools 2.5 and PhotoFrame 4.5 plugins. Both offer only approx. 20 effects whereas the full versions contain several hundreds or more than one thousand effects.

NeatImage
... is an noise reduction software, whose demo edition is available as a standalone and 32-bit/64-bit Photoshop plugins. The limitations are that the standalone only saves JPEG files with 91% quality and does not support batch processing. The demo plugins are not enabled for smart filtering and only process up to 1024x1024 pixels in an image and 8 bits/channel images.

8bf Plugin Filters
Jim Clatfelter's 8bf plugin collection consists of various plugins: The AAA OPTIONS plugin offers more than 50 filter options and 16 blend modes and the AAA BLUR OPTIONS is a plugin that contains various blur effects. Nevertheless the old plugins are still available for download. The 8bf plugins are now also compatible with Vista. AAA BLENDER lets you open a mask, texture, grunge or paint layer and blend it with your image with various blend modes. It is also possible to blend the current image or a modified version of it with itself. AAA Buzzer simplifies images while retaining sharp edges. It works slower at a higher ratio and also removes more details. AAA Framer adds a variety of frames to images. You can adjust the width, contour, brightness and frame color.

virtualPhotographer
... allows you to create a variety of photographic styles. Effects like film grain, soft focus, B/W, B/W tinting and high contrast can be applied to the image in one step. It also offers many presets which can be fine tuned for your requirements. Version 1.5.6 has a new resizable and more organized dialog. It offers 200 presets, a split-screen preview and a batch processing option.

RedEYes
AlphaPlugins offers a free Photoshop-compatible filter plugin called RedEYes. As its name suggests it is meant for red-eye reduction. It asks you to create a selection around the eye before you run the plugin and offers two sliders to adjust the correction.

Vicanek Plugins
Mr. Vicanek offers several free plugins. The Color Cube plugin provides a 3D visualization of all colors in an image, which can e.g. help to detect color clipping. You can spin the color cube and view it from any angle you want. The PanoWarp plugin performs transformations that are necessary for stitching panorama images. The Perspective plugin lets you pan, tilt, rotate, reposition and resize an image. The Pinocchio plugin is meant as a fun tool for distorting images and the Vignette Corrector removes or applies vignetting effects. The Contrast Mask plugin enhances images with too much contrast and also suppresses halos. The Sliding Tile Puzzle plugin lets you play this well known game. Unfortunately you can not apply the effect to the image. The new Color Replacer plugin is meant as a replacement for Photoshop's Replace Color command. It claims to be more flexible as it lets you select source and target colors independently. It also lets you colorize gray areas, which can be used e.g. for recovering color in overexposed areas. Hue Restorer tries to fix hue shifts in overexposed images and Wire Worm removes wires and other unwanted objects from images.

Pog's Plugins
... consist of five Photoshop plugins on his web site. Pog’s Lab Overlayer plugin performs blending in overlay mode, Variable Blurrinator applies a selective blur effect based on a brightness mask, the Mono Renditionizer plugin is a channel mixer with a few specialties and Lab Blender blends the image with itself in Lab mode. Pog’s Color Filtrator is a selective desaturation tool that offers specific hue ranges for creating B&W images.

4N6site Plugins
4N6site.com offers four freeware plugins, which are mainly meant for forensic tasks. "Color Deconvolve" separates or removes color components from the image, the Digitization plugin saves coordinates of features in large images a text file and the Fourier Transform plugin filters images in the frequency domain, e.g. for separating or enhancing periodical patterns. The "Warping" plugin lets you change the perspective of photos. It maps the image area that is enclosed by 4 definable control points to the whole image.

FoksMarx recolorLE
... is a feature-reduced free version of the commercial recolorST plugin. It can be used for color equalization, color enhancement, removal of color stains and bleaches and also for artistic color effects.

Rudolf's Black and White Works 
... is a free filter plugin for converting color images to B&W. The conversion is done with the help of a hue and saturation slider. There is also an option for toning the images and a preset feature

Aphtophoto  
The Aphtophoto collection consists of three free plugins. The Exposure plugin simulates photographic exposure and lets you change the contrast. The Fix Focus filter is for rescuing oversharpened images by smoothing the edges. Finally, the Auto White Balance plugin tries to color correct an image without any user input.

Wire Pilot
... is a free plugin and application for retouching wires, posts, antennas and other unwanted linear objects from a photo.

Magic Enhancer Lite & Outliner
Image Skill offers two free plugins (for Windows). Magic Enhancer Lite is a plugin for brightening shadows, darkening shadows and adjusting local contrast as well as the color temperature. There is also a commercial Pro version with a few more features. The Outliner plugin turns your image into a line drawing.

SmartCurve
... from EasyFilter was developed for Photoshop Elements as a compensation for the missing Curves command, but you can use it in Photoshop and other applications, too. It supports RGB and Grayscale images with 8 and 16 bit color depth, displays a histogram and an Auto correction button.

Fotomatic Plugins & Final Impact Vivida  
Cybia released eight free Fotomatic plugins and the free Vivida plugin from the otherwise commercial Final Impact series. Vivida is meant for adding impact to underexposed and dull photos by boosting the brightness, contrast and saturation in individual color channels. NightScope from Fotomatic is a filter for adding a basic "night-vision" effect to your digital photographs, Pseudo-IR creates a similar look as traditional B&W infra-red film and BW-Plus quickly turns your colour images into grayscale, but with the added option of using a colored optical lens filter. Hi-Spot creates high-contrast B&W effects as well as monochrome tints, G-Force is for B&W grain effects and Techni-X produces high contrast effects by bleaching out the midtones. SkyGrad is for tinting the sky area of photos. It overlays an increasingly transparent, colored gradient from top to bottom. The FastFix plugin corrects with the help of the brightness, contrast, saturation, and three color parameters. It is also capable of opening and saving presets.

True-Pro-Converter - Not available anymore
... offers a few B&W and sepia variations. It is commercial, but the demo version lets you apply its effects to 8 bit images. For using it on 16bit images, you need to buy the full version.

Simpel Filters
RGB Channel Mixer and Gray Scale Mixer are enhanced versions of the Channel Mixer in Photoshop and finally Color Space Converter lets you convert an image between various color spaces. There are also commercial Pro version of the two Mixer plugins available.

Photo-Plugins
George Fournaris offers five filter plugins (for Windows) called B/W Conversion, Local Contrast Enhancement, Soft Focus, Contrast Mask, Gradient Blur, Lens Corrector, High Pass Sharpening and Selective Saturation for free. Additionally the ppLabCor plugin corrects a bug in the current version of ColorLab* that concerning Lab TIFFs.The most interesting one is probably the B/W Conversion plugin which offers a lot of options for creating B/W images. The author asks for a donation via Paypal if you like and use his plugins.

Gradient Remover & Vignetting Remover - Not available anymore
... from Rob Miller can be used with 8bit and 16bit RGB images for removing vignetting and background gradients from astronomical photos. Normal photos work, too. It is freeware, but the author asks you to donate $5 if you like it.

Multiple Exposure & BW Conversion
Rob Williams offers two plugins that are fully-functional shareware. The Multiple Exposure plugin creates abstract multiple exposure images from a single photo and the BW Conversion plugin converts images to B/W with the help of a few color filters. If you intend to use these plugins, please contribute $20 to Mr. Williams for his efforts, otherwise he may decide to make his plugins fully commercial.

Fiddaman Plugins - Currently Down
Tom Fiddaman offers six free photo correction plugins (for Windows) that were created with Filter Meister. The SelfToner plugin tones images from their own palette or with tones from other images, PFree reduces purple fringing whereas CAfree reduces blue fringing and NoisePlot visualizes noise. Finally, the Luminosity plugin is meant for highlight and shadow correction and Reluminate performs luminosity adjustments. The plugins aren't that easy to use, because many sliders have very technical names and only a few explanations are offered on the product pages. Additionally many slider settings produce effects that aren't that desirable, so you need to fiddle a lot with the sliders. Nevertheless it is worth trying them.

Reindeergraphics.com Plugins  
... include several free plugins for photo editing. The Wide Histogram plugin displays enhanced histogram of 16-bit images. The plugin provides a 512, 768, or 1024 pixel wide histograms and eight modes for the histogram, including RGB, Red, Green, Blue, Colors, Hue, Saturation and Luminance. The Custom Filteris an enhanced version of the custom/user filters that can be found in various image applications. It supports a 7x7 convolution array, accepts real (floating point) numbers for greater precision and lets you save and open presets. The Adaptive Equalization plugin increases the local contrast of images by reducing overall dynamic range. The Enter Magnificationfilter calculates the length of a calibration bar. TabbedText reads and writes a grayscale images from and to a tab-delimited text file. The text file can be created and manipulated in a spreadsheet like Excel or produced with text output from any arbitrary source. The Select Edges plugin creates a selection from the contours of the edges in the image. With the help of that selection you can selectively process the image with other filters like Gaussian Blur or Unsharp Mask.

ChannelMixer - Currently Down
... is a freeware plugin that is meant for Photoshop Elements users, which don't have a tool with that name in their application. Unlike Photoshop's ChannelMixer it lets you only do custom conversion to B&W and no color effects. Unfortunately this plugin has the same problem as his Photoshop counterpart: it doesn't keep brightness constant when converting to B&W, so you have to be careful when using it.

Flo's UnDistort filter
.... is a plugin for correcting deformations of photographic images, e.g. barrel and pincushion deformations, perspective deformations and chromatic aberrations. The demo version is completely functional for images smaller than about 800*600 pixels. For processing bigger images, you have to purchase the full version for $15.

Polaroid Dust & Scratch Removal Utility  
The Polaroid Dust & Scratch Removal Utility consists of a standalone application and a plugin. The application offers various tools for creating selections whereas the plugin offers an interactive preview which makes it easier to create the desired effect. Although it sometimes renders quite slowly, it is a nice addition to the Dust & Scratch Removal tool in some graphics applications.

Sharpen filter
.... is a very simple filter which lets you only adjust the sharpness intensity. It is a bit superior to the Sharpen filter that is built into many image editing applications. The download link for this filter is at the bottom of the page.

Colleen's Photoshop Fun Pack
5 filter plug-ins for Adobe Photoshop for Macintosh. Rotate Color rotates the color in the RGB space. Create B/W creates black and white (gray scale) images from color images. Kwick Mask creates a selection from RGB images. Adjust Saturation gives you more control over the saturation adjustment. Modulate Color modulates the HSB value of the image using the mask value. Variable Blur achieves soft-focus effects very easily.

AIM DeepSpace & Photoshop Plugins - Currently Down
Some plugins with basic image manipulation functions plus 5 other plugins: The GAMMA filter applies the accurate gamma transfer function, DENSITY provides density conversion which can be useful in creating a density mask. SPACE HUNTER is useful as the first step in editing images of unknown working space and generally for hue, saturation and white-balance corrections. USM is a Unsharp Mask filter.

Metrix
... is a plugin for adapting two images to each by match the colors of both images. The adapted images can e.g. be used to create a panorama image. Only works fine with very similiar images.

Red Prince Flips 'n Rolls, Noise Generator, Whitewash & Pixie Dust
Flips 'n' Rolls is a collection of 19 plugins without dialogs that flip, roll, invert and reverse the order of bits in the RGB channels. The Noise Generator plugin creates a noise effect and the Whitewash plugin makes white colors transparent. The Pixie Dust collection consists of 19 plugins (only some of them have a dialog) that create various simple contrast, brightness, monochrome and solarisation effects.

Web Design

BorderMania Pro and PhotoSwizzle
The previously commercial BorderMania Pro and PhotoSwizzle plugins have been made freeware now. BorderMania Pro 5 creates a variety of basic borders and buttons and PhotoSwizzle 3 produces photocopy, button, drop shadow, kaleidoscope, prism, fractal and frame effects. The developer asks for a donation if you like the plugins.

3D Shadow
Lokas Software offers the free 3D Shadow Photoshop-compatible plugin. It creates various types of 3D shadows from a selection. Settings include transparency level, perspective, shadow color, position and X/Y/Z angles. The preview only shows the image at 100% and there is no zoom option. This makes it very hard to adjust the effect if the selection is almost as large or larger as the preview.

WebClipper & PhotoHTML
"WebClipper" from Boxtopsoft corrects the color drift from Web safe colors that often happens during color reduction and allows you to create hybrid images combining custom and Web safe colors easily. Hybrid images allow for greater image quality than those color reduced to the Web safe palette, while still largely eliminating most unwanted dithering when images are viewed on 8-bit Windows systems. "PhotoHTML" converts any image to an HTML table. Each pixel in the image becomes a 1 x 1 pixel colored cell in the table.

Gregory Paret's Plugins  
"Grids" is a plugin for placing grids on your image, "Polygons" draws N-sided polygons and a circle, "Color Counter" counts the colors used in an image, "Selection Outliner and Un-Featherer" finds the rectangular outline of a selection and has options to remove feathering from a selection, while the "Gamma Filter" tries to compensate the fact that the Photoshop Levels control does not do an arithmetically consistent Gamma adjustment. Finally "HTML Color Tags" which is only available for Windows displays the current foreground and background in hexadecimal format.

Extensis PhotoBevel  
... instantly creates inner and outer bevels on any part of your image or text. Lets you adjust bevel width, softness, highlight/shadow balance, intensity, and light direction.

Extensis PhotoText  
... applies bold, italic, outline and shadow styles without requiring the corresponding printer fonts.

Patterns / Textures

Background Maniac Filters
Various plugins that produce knitted backgrounds, oriental patterns and other cloth textures. There is also a tutorial that shows how to create plaid patterns with one of the plugins.

Redfield Freeware Plugins
Jama 3D and Lattice Composer are two 8bf plugins for creating cellular and mesh structures from 2D images, as well as 3D shapes and backgrounds.
Seamless Workshop creates seamless tiles of any image by cross blending the borders of the image. Water Ripples creates realistic water ripples and produces unlimited variations of rippled surfaces. The Craquelure 3D plugin creates a wide range of well known craquelure effects.The Face Control plugin allows you to change facial expressions in a simple fashion. Human, animal, alien, or any other kind of faces are possible. The Redfield++ Bas-Relief filter plugin turns 8-bit RGB images into a carved-in bas-relief with controlable surface lighting. The effect can also make the image look like aluminum foil, hammered metal, carved stone or pencil sketch.

Birgits Chaos   - Currently Down
... is a set of 19 plugins (for Windows) that produce nice fabric patterns. They were created with FilterMeister.

Tessela Plugins  
Eric Jones also offers two nice plugins (for Windows) called Tessela and Check Out. They generate nice kaleidoscopic and chess-like patterns.

Filter Farm
is a freeware plugin that creates colorful noise effects according to random algorithms.

Painting & Drawing

Deep Paint 2
Right Hemisphere decided to discontinue their DeepPaint 2 product and make it available for free. Deep Paint is a painting tool that offers artistic photo-cloning, fully editable brush and canvas settings. It simulates oil, acrylic and watercolor brushes. Deep Paint works as a Photoshop plugin as well as standalone application. For more information see here.

Fantastic Machines' Paint Engine 1.1 OLD BETA
... has different presets for turning photos into paintings.

Wacom Pen Tools  
... for working with a Wacom tablet.

3D

AmphiSoft POV Sphere Mosaic
... is a a Photoshop-compatible plugin (for Windows) for exporting an image to POV-Ray format. It converts the image pixels into 3D spheres, which need to be rendered with the POV-Ray freeware too from www.povray.org.

Adobe's Google 3D Warehouse Plugin
Adobe released a free plugin (for Windows/Mac) that provides access to the Google 3D Warehouse from within Photoshop CS3 Extended. With it you can participate in the 3D Warehouse community by searching, storing and sharing thousands of free 3D models and other content. Models include everything needed for a 3D world including: buildings, houses, bridges, statues, sculptures, couches, cars, people, pets and more.

Normal Map Generation Filter & PhotoShop DXT Compression Plugin
Nvidia offer two free plugins for Windows. The Normal Map Generation Filter allows you to convert any image or layer to a normal map. It also includes a 3D preview with per-pixel lighting to view the generated normal map. The PhotoShop DXT Compression Plugin lets you read and write compressed or uncompressed .dds files. The plugins require DirectX8 and msvcr70.dll to run. Both can be downloaded from their web site.

Rasterizer Plug
... is a plug-in for Photoshop 5.0 or later that renders hi-resolution screenshots of 3D models included in Infinity MetaFiles directly onto a Photoshop layer with transparency.

CALLISTO - Currently Down
is a shareware plugin for Adobe Photoshop that allows Photoshop users to create terrains and spheroidal objects and also import and render 3DMF models. When using Callisto you can manipulate 3DMF models on the screen and make adjustments to lighting and background before rendering it out. Callisto is fully functional and lets you save your output either in 2D (at 320x240 pixels) or as a 3DMF model. Users who pay the shareware fee can output 2D renderings at resolutions up to 2560 x 1920 pixels.

Various

RIPMaster Ps
... offers printing feature for textile and surface designers like Step & Repeat, Horizontal & Vertical Drop, Perceptual & Absolute Workflows, HCL/Lab and Spectro Color Input and more. Beside the free demo version there are also commercial Studio and Pro versions that offer more features, enhanced printer driver support and custom printer profiles.

Bluwi Lalala
... makes a sound when selecting tools. Not all tools and buttons make a sound, mostly the shortcuts.

Graphest DepthDither
... is a free filter plugin that dithers images in order to display them accurately on mobile phones which usually do not support standard 24 bit images. DepthDither uses 3 dithering methods. You can choose a destination color depth of 2 bit, 4 bit, 12 bit, 15 bit, 16 bit and 18 bit. Its home page is not available anymore. For another download link see here.

Epson Print Plugin
... offers options for making colour-managed and multiple-image printing easier. It works in three steps: image selection, layout selection/definition and printer settings plus previewing. It offers flexible multi-page layouts with three layout types. Over 170 templates are available as standard and users can even create custom templates. It supports Photoshop CS2 (9.02), CS3, Adobe Elements 4.01, 5.02 and 6 as well as the Epson Stylus Photo 1400, R1800, R1900, R2400, R2880 and Stylus Pro 3800 printers. It is available in 7 languages.

FlickrShop Automation Plugin
... works in Photoshop CS2 and CS3 and allows you to upload images to the Flickr photo sharing website from within Photoshop.

Superrune Plugins
... for retouching spherical and equirectangular panoramas. The plugins will map the panorama distortions to flat planes so that they are easily edited. The retouched parts can also be converted back to spherical/equirectangular to apply the edits to your original panorama.

Telegraphics Plugins
Telegraphics offer several plugins (for Win/Mac). The 5_6_5 plugin reduces 8bit RGB channels to 16 bits or 65536 colors whereas the 12bits plugin reduces images to 12 bits or 4096 colors. The Count Color plugin counts distinct RGB colors in an image or selection. "Life" implements Conway's Life cellular automaton which produces patterns that own certaincharacteristics of life. Histotext exports histogram numbers as a text file. The Scramble Filter break an image into square or rectangular blocks and rearranges them randomly like a sliding block puzzle.

GML Matting
... is a masking plugin for extracting objects from their background. It supports output to the layer mask and even applications without an opacity channel. The GML Image Undistorter application is also offered for free on the same web site.

Panorama Tools Plug-ins (16-bit)
The Panorama Tools plugins, originally written by Helmut Dersch, now support both 8-bit and 16-bit images. They are compatible with Photoshop 5.5 and above and Paint Shop Pro.

Proxel EXIF Tool
... is a Photoshop plugin that can display EXIF and other meta information of a certain file. It is based on the Perl::ExifTool, so you will need Perl, e.g. ActivePerl, and the Perl::ExifTool installed on your computer in order to use the plugin.

SF Maskerade LE
... creates luminance masks, color masks and saturation masks. More masking options can be found in the commercial version.

Disable VM Buffering Plugin for Photoshop  
... can be installed to eliminate pauses during painting on MacOS X machines with more than 4GB of physical RAM. However, there are some cost in performance with very large documents. It will have no effect on machines with 4GB or less RAM.

FilterFoundry  
Filter Foundry is basically a Filter Factory plugin clone. It works with Photoshop 3 - 7 on Power Macs (OS X, OS 9 and earlier), 68K Mac and under Windows. That means that it supports more platforms than the original FilterFactory from Adobe which was discontinued. It also is scriptable. The author asks for a donation if you use this product.

FilterFormula
ATS Graphics is giving away their FilterFormula plugin (for Windows), which wasn't updated since 1999, for free. FilterFormula is an advanced version of FilterFactory and can be used to create your own Photoshop-compartible plugins. To get the plugin you have to enter a name and valid email address. The download instructions are sent out manually, so it can take several days.

XLProfiler
... is a freeware ICC profiler for digital cameras and scanners, it is a combination of a Microsoft Excel Workbook and a standard Adobe Photoshop plug-in filter. The procedure looks quite complex, so you need to invest some time.

AutoCrop
... is a selection plugin for Photoshop 5 and higher (for Windows). It creates a selection on images with an uniform border. This selection can then be used to crop the image with Photoshop's own Crop function.

xMeta
fnord offers the free xMeta package (for Macintosh), a set of three simple plugins for exporting metadata from Photoshop in raw binary form. It can export ICC Profiles, EXIF camera data and IPTC press information. ICC Profiles are of particular interest, as they can be added to the ColorSync profiles folder.

Digimarc Watermark Plugin  
Digiamrc offers a free 1.7 upgrade for their watermarking plugin which is delivered with many image applications for Mac and Windows. The Digimarc plugin enable you to detect, embed, and read Digimarc watermarks with many leading image editing applications.

Type Chameleon - Not available anymore?
... from Jintek is a free Photoshop plugin for creating type effects. It produces wildly distorted type on a path, circle, arc or trapezoid as well as rotates, skews and distorts shapes and adds borders, fills, and drop shadows. The result can be directly rasterized and merged with the image or saved as an EPS file if you want to keep the type resolution independent . The EPS file can then be copied into any Photoshop layer, where it will adapt to the resolution of the rest of the Photoshop file. Type Chameleon requires Photoshop 4.0 or later and Adobe Type Manager 3.5 or later.

Vischeck
... shows you how things look to someone who is colorblind. You can try Vischeck online, but you can also download plugins for Photoshop or for ImageJ to run. Many pictures, documents and web pages are hard to read for colorblind people (up to 5% of the population) because they cannot distinguish some colors. Vischeck lets designers check their work for colorblind visibility. It is also interesting to anyone who is just plain curious about what the world looks like if you are color blind.

Pro Canvas & WallPampered
Pro Canvas is an automation plugin designed to enhance and replace the existing Canvas command in Adobe Photoshop. While providing you with all of the standard Canvas options (in Absolute mode), Pro Canvas also adds a powerful new Relative mode that allows you to add or subtract from each side independently and simultaneously. WallPampered is an automation plugin (.8li) for Adobe Photoshop only, which allows you to set your Windows desktop wallpaper instantly from within Photoshop itself. When the plugin is installed you activate it from the Automate sub menu found of the File menu in Photoshop. Both plugins are Shareware or Honorware and have no nags or time limits.

Panorama Tools  
... allow to generate, edit and transform many kinds of panoramic images.

The Photoshop 7.0 Scripting plugin: Windows Download / Mac Download  
... lets you automate repetitive tasks and key workflows in Adobe Photoshop 7.0. It lets you write scripts using JavaScript, Visual Basic or AppleScript to do certain tasks in Photoshop automatically. This plugin is already installed by default with Photoshop CS.

Image Format / Importing

Softimage Pic Image Reader  
.... is an image format plugin for opening Softimage Pic files. You need to register with the web site in order to download it.

Icon Plugin  
.... is a free file format plugin for exporting and importing Windows icons (.ico files). Unlike the ICO plugin from Telegraphics it also lets you add images to existing icon files.

XDepth  
.... is an image and video compression solution for providing more precision and color depth than JPEG while staying compatible with it. A free XDepth plugin for Photoshop CS2 and CS3 is available. It adds the ability to save compressed High Dynamic Range images in JPEG files. The resulting files can still be edited and displayed by applications and browsers as usual, but you need to use the free XDepth ActiveX control to display the HDR content of the JPEG files in Internet Explorer.

Telegraphics Plugins  
.... let you open EI images, Windows ICO, MacPaint, Paint Shop Pro 5-7, SGI, GameBoy Advanced, WBMP, 8XI and DITABIS/DIBIS files in Photoshop. Additionally the Photoshop File Extract/Recover plugin recovers image layers from corrupted PSD and PSB files that Photoshop does not or only partially open. The TIFFlib Format Plugin opens and saves TIFF files with a wider variety of TIFF flavours and compression types than Photoshop itslef.

Microsoft HD Photo Plugin  
The BETA release of the Microsoft HD Photo plugin adds support for the HD Photo format to Photoshop CS2 and CS3. The HD Photo format offers compression with up to twice the efficiency of JPEG with fewer damaging artifacts. HD Photo offers both lossless and lossy image compression, and can retain the full dynamic range and color gamut data from a camera's sensor.

Genuine Fractals Reader Plugin  
OnOne Software made the Genuine Fractals Reader Plugin for Photoshop CS and CS2 (Win/Mac) available. It is a format plugin that lets you open images in the Genuine Fractals .STN format, which were saved by the commercial Genuine Fractals product. It uses a unique fractal-based algorithm to increase the size of images by creating artificial details that are relatively similar to the original details. So you can now send people your photos as small .STN files, because these people just need the free Genuine Fractals Reader Plugin and don't need to buy the commercial product. For downloading it look under "General Downloads".

JNG Format Plugin
The JNG (JPEG Network Graphics) Format encapsulates a JPEG datastream in PNG-style chunks. Although JNG was primarily a MNG sub format, standalone JNG files are also possible now. The JNG file format plugin for Photoshop from T. Philipp doesn't have a web site yet, but can be downloaded from:

Olympus RAW-Plug-in 2.0  
... lets you import and process .orf RAW photos captured with an Olympus camera in Photoshop. It offers a preview and several options for adjusting exposure, white balance, contrast, sharpness, saturation and color space. If you already own Photoshop CS or CS2, we recommend that you use the Camera RAW plugin (that is already installed with Photoshop) instead.

Photoshop DDS Plugin
... allows you to open DDS files in Photoshop. DDS files are skin files from a game from Crytek. You need to create an account to download it.

CartaPGM
... is a Photoshop plugin that reads and writes files in the Portable Gray Map (PGM) format.

FITS Liberator  
... lets you open and process astronomical images in FITS format in 8 and 16bit. It was designed for Photoshop and Photoshop Elements, but it also seems to work in Paint Shop Pro.

JPEG2000 File Format Plugin
LEAD Technologies released a free JPEG2000 file format plugin for Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro. The J2K and JP2 formats are supported for 8bit and 24bit images, there are lossless and lossy compression options and the file size can be controlled precisely. To get this plugin you have to place it in the order cart and carry out an order without paying anything.

Dempsey's Olympus RAW File Import Plugin
Paul Dempsey offers an Olympus RAW File (.ORF) import plugin as well as a standalone application at his web site. The plugin offers options for Color Balance, Gamma Correction, Auto Levels, Inversion and B/W. The standalone ORF.exe program is a much later development than the plugin and therefore includes many more features. ORF.exe offers separate histograms and more scaling (color balance) options. There is also an accompanying ORFDump tool for recreating thumbnail (.THM) files and extracting EXIF information to a text file.

j2k and SuperPNG  
j2k (Macintosh) is a Photoshop plugin for reading and writing the JPEG 2000 file format, the successor to JPEG. Also known as JP2, JPEG 2000 uses wavelet compression to create small images with less objectionable artifacts than JPEG's DCT compression. It also features: Alpha transparency, Lossless compression mode and 16-bit color. SuperPNG (Win/Mac) is a plugin for saving PNG ("ping") files. SuperPNG is also much faster than Adobe's PNG plugin and supports: Variable Compression, Gamma Correction and Meta Data saving.

UnWired or WBMP file format plugin
... lets you quickly and easily save wireless bitmap (WBMP) files e.g. for use in WAP sites. The plugin can be used with Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro or any other application that supports .8bi file format plugins.

The ECW v2.0 file format plugin
... enables you to read and compress Enhanced Compressed Wavelet (ECW) v2.0 images from within Photoshop. The Open Standard ECW technology is a large-image compression technology that enables applications to compress imagery. The plugin allows reading compressed ECW images of any size. However, as Photoshop has a limit of 32,000 x 32,000 pixel for image size, the plug-in will automatically reduce the image size to less than this size if you open a larger ECW file. You can create compressed ECW images by using File->Save to the ECW format from within Photoshop. This plugin restricts the image size being compressed to 500MB.

The PRINT Image Matching Plug-in for Adobe Photoshop  
.... is available on the Photoshop 7.0 CD and for Photoshop 6.0 and Adobe Photoshop Elements 1.0 on the PRINT Image Matching web site. It is designed to import JPEG files containing P.I.M. information and retains the P.I.M. effects during the importing process. This PRINT Image Matching Plug-in meets the needs of many digital photographers who want to be able to import an image into Photoshop and not lose the valuable P.I.M. data. To use the PRINT Image Matching technology you need the combination of a PRINT Image Matching-enabled digital camera, printer and software.

 

To get the latest news about free plugins, tools and effects please subscribe to The Plugin Newsletter.