A-Z of Free Photoshop Plugins and Filters in photoshop upates

The Photoshop community is choc-full of many free resources, tutorials, tips and techniques, .psd files and even Actions. There is one area that it sadly lacks in, and that is free plugins and filters. Of course, Photoshop has been the pioneer in graphic editor development for a long time now, and with each new version (its current version is CS4) has added an endless supply of features and addons, and as a result, perhaps the need for free plugins or filters is no longer required. Or has it been ignored?
Traditionally plugins are an amateur photographer’s best friend, take your shots, fire up Photoshop, apply some well preset filters, and hey presto you have a reasonably professional image. Professional photographers have been known to use plugins as a base and then tweak and add effects to achieve there own personal professional touch. Plugins are basically an indispensable tool that do not recieve the attention they deserve. And that brings us back to our original mystery, why are there so few free plugins and filters? Do you know the answer? I don’t.

In this A-Z of free Photoshop plugins and filters you will find a few plugins that are (almost) as old as time itself, do not fear, they will work perfectly on all versions of Photoshop and the effect they produce are just as useful now as they were then. If you are looking for a simple and easy method to add effects to an image, this is the post for you.

A-Z of Free Photoshop Plugins & Filters

3D Shadow

This handy plugin easily creates various types of 3D shadows from objects such as letters, numbers, shapes and so on. All settings are present in a single window – transparency level, perspective, shadow color and position, X/Y/Z angles, and many more.
More Details and Downloads

AAA Buzzer

AAA Buzzer simplifies your image while retaining sharp edges, with low ratio settings in works fairly quickly, it does work slower at a higher ratio, but it also removes more detail.
More Details and Downloads

Absolute Color

Absolute Color is based on a hue wheel subdivided into 6 sectors of 60 degrees. Choose a slector color segment and it will restrict the tints of the image for that color.
More Details and Downloads

B/W Conversion

This is a black and white conversion plugin with a difference. It allows you to take total control over the tonal response of Red, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue and Magenta, and the intermediate hues. The user can boost each colors tonal response all the way up to white or limit it down to black, without affecting the other colors at all .
More Details and Downloads

Bad Dream

Bad Dream gives the kind of color-casts that you would normally spend hours trying to correct; it also gives a soft, misty effect, and the final result can be quite pleasing on the right kind of image.
More Details and Downloads

Bas-Relief

This filter transforms an image to appear as though it is carved in bas-relief, giving it a lighting effects to accent the surface variations. It can look like aluminum foil, hammered metal, or carved stone, it can also be used to convert a photo into a pencil sketch.
More Details and Downloads

Camouflage

Use the Camouflage plug-in to make army, fashion and animal camo. The Camouflage plug-in creates seamless images, this means you can use them as texturesand patterns for 3D models or as a background for web sites, they can even be used as a pattern for clothing.
More Details and Downloads

Caravaggio

This plugin creates a simple ‘oil-painting’ effect, with just four sliders to adjust the image, choose from Creativity, Exuberance, Attentiveness and Moodswing
More Details and Downloads

Chalkaholic

Chalkaholic renders chalk and charcoal type effects with artistic style and flair. It creates a uniquely effective artistic rendering options, it is an essential addition to any digital artist’s effects collection.
More Details and Downloads

Circle to Square

With this plugin you can convert any circle into a square.
More Details and Downloads

Cloud 2.2

This plugin creates seamless life like clouds on any image. You can control the blur, contour and light color.
More Details and Downloads

Color MegaMix

Color MegaMix modifies the colors of any image, it is based on two rows of colors: 8 source colors and 8 target colors. Taking into account this data, the plugin reconstructs completely the color space of the image.
More Details and Downloads

Color Replacer

This filter performs color replacement functions. The function is similar to Photoshop’s Replace Color command, however, this plugin is more flexible since you can select the source and target colors independently. Therefore, it is possible to tint gray areas with an arbitrary color, which can be useful for recovering the color in overexposed areas.
More Details and Downloads

ColorWorks

This plugin comes packaged with 20 effects for modifying image color values in many different ways. You can use them for subtle correction of your digital photos or experiment with the more dramatic transformations that are available. The effects are quite basic, but they can be handy for use on a regular basis.
More Details and Downloads

Contrast Balance

Contrast Balance enhances the traditional filter luminosity/contrast and breaks it down into four balances of constant/contrast, using the following four oppositions: white-black, red-cyan, green-magenta, blue-yellow.
More Details and Downloads

Contrast Mask

This plugin uses a contrast mask to reduce the overall contrast of the image, simultaneously bringing out more detail in both highlights and shadows.
A b/w negative of the image is blured (with a radius controlled by the “Smoothing” slider) to avoid hard edges and then overlayed with the original, darkening the highlights and lightening the shadows. The opacity of the overlay is controlled by the “Strength” slider.
More Details and Downloads

Craquelure 3D

This filter creates a wide range of well known craquelure (krăkloor´) effects, that is useful in designing various abstract patterns, decorative surfaces and construction materials.
Two independent craquelure layers can be controlled to achieve an amazing variety of texture effects, from etched metal and silk plaster to melted glass and water ripples.
More Details and Downloads

Curves Plugin

The Curves plugin can create eight predetermined, interesting curves within your image. The plugins interface shows several thumbnails of the curves, select the one you like and then be impressed by the impact it will have on your image.
More Details and Downloads

DepthDither

DepthDither uses 3 ways to make the image seems to be continuous when the color is below 24 bit. Just like Photoshop, it provides diffusion, pattern and noise as the dither modes. You can choose the destination color depth, such as 2 bit, 4 bit, 12 bit, 15 bit, 16 bit, 18 bit, this is the main difference from Photoshop, the latter only provides less than 256 colors mode.
More Details and Downloads

Digitization

The Digitization plug-in has been designed to digitize positions of features in large image files. By clicking on these features their coordinates are saved to a textfile (CSV). The coordinates can then be used for further analysis. The image below shows an example of an analysis based on the data from the Digitization plug-in.
More Details and Downloads

Dreamy Photo

Dreamy Photo gives images a soft romantic feel. This is a superb effect for enhancing stock photography, digital camera photos and any image you want to add a warm feel to.
More Details and Downloads

Edges Fx

This plugin take advantage of an edge detection algorithm (precise) to obtain the following artistic effects : Colorize, Erode/Dilate, Sat Boost and Sketch.
More Details and Downloads

EdgeWorks

This plugin comes with 20 effects for creating dramatic edge and color modifications. They are best used when experimenting with intense photo transformations for a highly stylized look. They are also handy when creating interesting texture effects.
More Details and Downloads

EmbossWorks

This plugin can be used for producing various quick and easy embossing styles. They are handy when you need to add a sense of depth or relief to an otherwise flat image.
More Details and Downloads

Equalizer

This plugin offers three methods of equalization, with several options to make this process editable. The process takes advantage of the histogram of frequencies.
More Details and Downloads

Eraser Classic

Eraser classic makes it easier to replace any color you choose from your image. Activate the eyedropper, select the color directly in the preview window, and adjust tolerance .
More Details and Downloads

Face Control

Face Control plug-in allows you to change the facial expressions of people in the digital photos.
More Details and Downloads

Fine Threshold

Unlike the traditional threshold command of Photoshop, Fine Threshold allows you to get quickly, anti-aliased and sharp shapes.
More Details and Downloads

Flat Median

The Flat Median plugin is a little bit more useful than the “regular” median filter. You have added controls over the level of Flatness, it is “isotropic” just like the gaussian blur and you can apply the effect either horizontally or vertically.
More Details and Downloads

Fur Plugin

This plugin spreads a simple figure (line or circle with configurable dimensions/thickness) over the whole image. Each image can be filled using two methods: Solid, the figure is filled with a single color (determined by the figure’s center) and 180 deg, were the image source content is kept, but with 180 degree rotation.
More Details and Downloads

Fuzzifier

The Fuzzifier is a filter that produces diffusion, but preserve details. There are three sliders, designated ‘Spread’, ‘Strength’ and ‘Fuzziness’. At high ‘Spread’ settings, the effect becomes grain-like, so keep this slider at the low end unless that’s what you’re trying for. Strength, of course, controls the overall strength of the effect, while ‘Fuzziness’ controls the effectiveness with which detail is preserved.
More Details and Downloads

Gradient Blur

This plugin applies a gradient blur that draw the attention to the photograph’s main subject. There are sliders to control the position where the blur starts and it’s strength.
More Details and Downloads

Gradient Smithy

Gradient Smithy allows you to create what Photoshop calls the gradient map effect. Gradient Smithy allows to create complex gradients, quite easily.
More Details and Downloads

Grain Natural 2

Grain Natural creates a grain-a-like effect of your images. This plugin takes advantage of the colors already present in the image to achieve a natural result.
More Details and Downloads

Harmonix

Harmonix renders a single, horizontal line on an image, but this is no ordinary line, it is the result of superimposing up to ten separate harmonic frequencies, scaled to the screen. You can use it to create realistic graphs or demonstrate how to create other basic waveforms from nothing but carefully selected harmonic frequencies.
More Details and Downloads

Harry’s Filters

The famous “Harry’s Filters” is a series of filters that contains up to 69 different image effects. The main effect categories are called Color, Artistic, Gradients, Patterns, Warp, Noise, En/Decrypt, Other and Nature. It also includes filters for changing the image color or mood, for creating artistic effects, producing colorful gradients or impressive patterns, warping images and adding special noise effects to image. Additionally they let you encrypt and decrypt images with 64 bit keys, produce zoom, mirror or paint effects as well as natural effects like lightning, tornado and polar lights.
More Details and Downloads

High Pass Sharpening

This is a plugin to sharpen photos with the classic high pass method. The user can adjust the high pass filter radius, and control the blending with the original image.
More Details and Downloads

HSL Plus

HSL Plus is similar to the traditional hue/saturation/luminosity balance, but with some extras. It has a better color integrity, improved control over luminosity, and you also have the option of making an automatic contrast (due to the Auto button) then of re-adjusting.
More Details and Downloads

ICO Windows Icon

This plugin gives you an easy method for creating your web site’s favourites/shortcut/bookmark icon in Photoshop.
More Details and Downloads

Illustrator

This simple plugin creates an effect similar to a colored-ink illustration.
More Details and Downloads

Jama 3d

Jama 3D is one of the simplest ways to create corrugated style and cellular like patterns from 2D images. You can easily make various bricks and herring bone textures.
More Details and Downloads

Julia World

Julia ‘s curves are a family of mathematical curves (fractals) renowned for their beauties. This plugin is very easy to use, all you have to do to find a curve and simply click the Random button, thats it. It also allows endless zooming to help you easily customize colors.
More Details and Downloads

Kaleidoscope 2.1

Kaleidoscope 2.1 is a plugin which uses multiple symmetries to create beautiful patterns, it uses these three spinning effects: Mirror, Copy, Transition and Blend.
More Details and Downloads

Lattice Composer

Lattice Composer effectively designs grids and nettings, it can produce a variety of weave patterns, fabric textures, body art tattoos and skeleton simulations. The 3D text effects can be extraordinary.
More Details and Downloads

Lens Correction

This plugin corrects barrel and pincushion distortions that many zoom camera lenses produce. Just move the sliders to the left to correct barrel distortion, and to the right to correct pincushion .
More Details and Downloads

Local Contrast Enhancement

This plugin’s main purpose is to enhance the detail of an image. This is achieved by increasing the contrast between a pixel’s value and the mean value of the adjacent pixels in a local area of the photo. You can control the amount of contrast that is increased, the size of the local area and the amount of blending with the original photo.
More Details and Downloads

Local Equalization

From an artistic point of view, local equalization can be used if you wish to enhance the aspect of a given texture. It can also be used to analyze and optimize an image certain details are barely viewable.
More Details and Downloads

Luce

Luce blends radial or directional light beams into your image. There is a text box for adjusting the intensity of the effect.
More Details and Downloads

Magic Enhancer Lite

With Magic Enhancer you can essentially improve your photos by adjusting its lightness, contrast and color balance It is perfect for enhancement image and photos which lack lightness or uneven illumination, silhouetted images on dark backgrounds. Convenient color temperature control allows fixing color balance defects easily.
More Details and Downloads

MasterBlaster

A single Photoshop-compatible plug-in with 20 effects for “blasting” intense color into your images. Ideal for when you need to add dramatic impact to your photos or work.
More Details and Downloads

Melt 1.1

With this plugin, you can alter an image, using an effective wave style. Size, intensity, and aspect ratio of waves can be customized.
More Details and Downloads

Mezzy

The Mezzy plug-in comes packaged with 15 effects for creating a selection of simple grain and mezzo styles, it gives your photos a new look with these various effects. (No MAC version).
More Details and Downloads

Mistifier

The Mistifier recreates the hazy, soft-focus effect beloved of traditional SLR photographers. This is ideal for portraits, but can also be used to great effect on landscapes, giving a sort of dreamy quality.
More Details and Downloads

Mosaic

Mosaic makes your photos look as if they were created out of a mosaic tile. Photo-realistic depth and variable tile size and color options give this effect an infinite number of looks.
More Details and Downloads

NightScope

The Nightscope is a filter for adding a basic “night-vision” effect to your digital photographs and/or 2D and 3D computer-generated images.
It first removes all color from the picture and gives a very slight blur to indicate the camera is trying hard to focus in a low-light situation. Then you can choose to add grain either keeping it B&W or mixing separate red, green and blue channels to vary the effect.
More Details and Downloads

NightVision

The NightVision plug-in can make any image look like the ones from night-vision goggles. By using the effects in this plug-in, you can make images look like they are from a black & white security cameras or CCTV, it’s also possible to make them look like infra-red photos, or you can just use the interlace to make an image look like a TV picture.
More Details and Downloads

Nostalgia

The plugin selectively desaturates your image, but also gives a subtle change in hues. The end result is that some parts of the image become monochrome, while others take on a an unrealistic-looking coloration.
More Details and Downloads

Ornament

This a great free plugin, from Flaming Pear, it creates a quick-and-dirty 360° panoramic photograph with no strange lenses or image stitching needed.
More Details and Downloads

Panorama Tools

Panorama Tools is a free program which can be used to generate, edit and transform many kinds of panoramic images. It comes packaged with an added plugin called Realtime Panorama Editor (only Photoshop/Gimp version), which makes the Photoshop window an editable VR-viewer. You can pan left and right, tilt up and down, and zoom in and out. At any time you can use all the Photoshop tools to edit the image and instantly apply the changes to the warped panoramic image while keeping the interactive window open.
More Details and Downloads

Pastellise

Give your images a pastel effect with this simple plugin.
More Details and Downloads

Perspective Transformations

Sometimes it is hard choose the optimum angle to take a picture. If the object is essentially planar (e.g. a painting on a wall) or the angle is not off by much then there is hope that you can correct the perspective afterwards. The opposite may also be of interest if you want to make a composition and place objects at different angles, e.g. pep up screenshots for a brochure.
The Perspective plugin lets you carry out both active (“Modify” ) and passive (“Rectify” ) transformations. You can rotate the image around three axes, then reposition and resize it. Grid lines can be displayed both before and after transformation.
More Details and Downloads

Photo Tinter

“AS Photo tinter” is an image editing plug-in filter for extracting tone profile from toned black and white photos and applying extracted profiles to another photo. It is not yet another sepia effect – you may apply different tints to different areas of the photo, based on source brightness.
Homepage

Pinocchio

Pinocchio is mainly a fun tool to produce image distortions by mouse strokes. You can use it for caricatures and such. Just click on the preview image and drag in whichever direction, then use the sliders for fine tuning. This version lets you perform multiple mouse strokes without having to exit and reopen the plugin.
More Details and Downloads

Pole Transform 2.1

This plugin gives any image that cool Polar Panorama effect, aka “wee planets” .
More Details and Downloads

Posterizer

Posterizer is a plugin that gives you the option to posterize the luminosity and the hue of any image.
More Details and Downloads

Projection

This plugin gives you a collection of interactive perspective effects: the ability to tile an image into infinite space (copy or mirror mode), or to repeat all the edges The 3D effect can be achieved simply by moving the corners of the image (in the preview window).
More Details and Downloads

RedEyes

The RedEYes plugin removes the red eye effect often caused by a flash camera. It employs an easy-to-use semi-automatic algorithm that quickly and economically eliminates the problem.
More Details and Downloads

Retrodots

Retrodots is a simple plugin that generates dot grids which can be based on selections.
More Details and Downloads

ScreenWorks

The ScreenWorks plugin has 30 options for creating screen/mesh patterns. This provides you with a quick way to add small detailed and repetitive texture overlay effects to areas of your image in one easy step. The single slider setting gives you the option to add the chosen pattern on top of your image, or make the layer background white. (No MAC version).
More Details and Downloads

Seamless Border

With this plugin you can create a seamless border from any image. There are three modes: Compact overlaps borders of two tiles, and blends them in a linear way; Advantage: usually, creates the best continuity between tiles; Disadvantage: the size of the last tile may vary with the “Border Size” setting, and you will have to crop the result manually; Stretch: Unlike “Compact Mode” , tiles are first extended by stretching the borders; Mirror: Unlike “Compact Mode” , tiles are first extended by using symmetries.
More Details and Downloads

Seamless Workshop

Seamless Workshop creates a seamless tile from any image. You can also create a “surrealistic modification” of a picture, as in the image below. It is a powerful tool for texture creators, and a helpful toy for graphic designers. The unique ‘Seamless Blur’ effect can be useful for any available tileable pattern.
More Details and Downloads

Select Edges

The Select Edges plugin is a powerful tool for selective processing. You can select edge detail in your image for sharpening with Unsharp Mask without getting halos or switch to the inverse selection and use Gaussian Blur to diminish the background.
More Details and Downloads

Selective Saturation

This plugn, Selective Saturation, lets the user define a Saturation Zone by setting it’s center and range with two sliders. A mask preview mode is available to fine tune the settings.
More Details and Downloads

Serious Fog

This plugin gives your image a fog-like effect. Using the ‘Severity’ slider controls the thickness of the fog, and the ‘Whiteout’ slider lets you suggest that maybe the sun will burn off the fog later in the day. Simple, yet effective.
More Details and Downloads

Smart Refinement

This plug-in enhances sharpness, depth-of-field (DOF) and noise (dust) reduction.
More Details and Downloads

Snowflakes

With the Snowflakes plug-in, you can make it snow any time of the year, anywhere you want. You can control all aspects of a snow, adjust the size of the snowflakes, choose soft snowflakes or hail, the quantity and density of falling snowflakes and even the color of the flakes.
More Details and Downloads

Soft Focus

This plugins applies a soft focus effect, which is often useful in portraits or fashion photography. There are controls to adjust the focus softness, the overall strength of the effect and the blending mode of the overlayed blured image.
More Details and Downloads

Soft Vignette

Vignette effects, where the edges of the image shade off gradually, are always a popular feature required by photographers. This plugin is feature heavy, you can adjust the gradient shape, sharpness, invert the gradient, select from 14 preset effects, choose a pattern, select the effect strenghth and, of course, you can adjust the height and width.
More Details and Downloads

Sorting Tiles

Fundamentally, this filter cuts an image into several blocks, sorts out the colors, redistributes and creates a complicated pattern.
More Details and Downloads

Stereogram Lab Filter

The Stereogram Lab Filter generates hidden image stereograms within Photoshop.
More Details and Downloads

SwapShop

A single plugin with 15 effects for switching the color values in your images. Useful for experimenting with interesting combinations and creating surreal results. Windows only.
More Details and Downloads

Techni-X

A plug-in filter for very high contrast B&W effects which are ideal for certain illustration work. It bleaches out most of the mid-tone greys, leaving crisp dark blacks and bright clean whites. It will produce clear B&W images with limited tones which are suitable for cheap reproduction via the office photocopier or when published in newsprint.
More Details and Downloads

Thredgeholder

The Thredgeholder plugin provides an edge detection that’s simple to use but highly effective, just have a look at the screenshot below.
More Details and Downloads

Tone 1.0

This plugin can convert any image into an anti-alias tone pattern, similar to newspaper tones.
More Details and Downloads

Vibrations 1.1

This plugin has two different methods (“Levels” and “Lines” ) for creating a streak effect of your images . The filter has an inbuilt blur, in order to ensure smoothness.
More Details and Downloads

Water Ripples

The highly realistic water ripples effect designer has numerous options as well as an impressive 3D quality. The random settings generator produces unlimited variations of rippled surfaces.
More Details and Downloads

Weaver

This plugin creates a weave effect of your images.
More Details and Downloads

Xpose

Xpose is an exposure adjustment plugin, it is a quick adjustment tool that for highlights and shadows. With just a few sliders you can achieve better exposure of your digital photos.
More Details and Downloads

sr:smashingmagazine