Photoshop is a powerful image editing software which is very useful for web designers and photographers to create desired effects in the images. But sometimes it’s difficult to perform certain tasks manually in photoshop. Once there was a belief that only designers who have mastered photoshop can create special effects on photographs or images. But now with the help of Photoshop Plug-in anyone can create desired effects on their images.

Photoshop Plugins are actually add-ons to the main program which helps to attain additional image effects or performing tasks that are impossible or hard to fulfill using Adobe Photoshop alone. And they make the complicated task much easier and help users in creating amazing effects, designing faster & better.

200+ FREE PHOTOSHOP PLUGINS

In this post , I would like to share more than 200 photoshop plugins which are available for free. Hope it will help all photoshop newbies to create their desired image effects with much ease.

Water Ripples creator – photoshop plugin

Water Ripples is a freeware Adobe Photoshop compatible plug-in filter. 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.

Jama 3D photoshop plugin

Jama 3D is a freeware Adobe Photoshop compatible plug-in filter. It’s the simplest way to create corrugated and cellular like patterns from 2D images. You can easily make various bricks and herring bone textures. Sequenced filtering produces bizarre unreal deformations of the original picture, crumpled paper effect, etc. Using different 2D shapes on a transparent layer produces complicated 3D border effects. The edge antialiasing option improves the dithering. The filter is extremely compact and accessible.

Lattice Composer – Photoshop Plugin

Lattice Composer is a freeware Adobe Photoshop compatible plug-in filter. It effectively designs grids and nettings. It produces a variety of weave patterns, fabric textures, body art tattoos and skeleton simulations.

Luce Photoshop plugin

This plugin helps to control the light exposure and lets designers to create stunning effects with their images.

ScreenWorks – Simple Pattern Generation

Screenworks is a free Photoshop-compatible plug-in with 30 options for creating screen/mesh patterns. It 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.

AlphaWorks – Transparency Effects

AlphaWorks is a free Photoshop-compatible plug-in filter which is very useful for removing black or white values and making the region transparent. There are 6 different options for you to choose from, depending on the type of image you are working on (colour photo, mono photo, lineart).

ColourWorks – Colour Modification

Free Photoshop-compatible plug-in with 20 effects for modifying image colour values in different ways. You can use them for subtle correction of your digital photos or experiment with the more dramatic transformations that are available.

Local Contrast Enhancement – Photoshop Plugin

This is accomplished 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 the increase of contrast, the size of the local area and the amount of blending with the original photo.

Smart Refinment Filter plug-in for Adobe Photoshop

Smart Refinement Filter is an Adobe Photoshop plug-in for photographic images enhancement. This plug-in allows: sharpness and depth-of-field (DOF) enhancement, and noise (dust) reduction.

SuperPNG photoshop plugin

SuperPNG is a free Adobe Photoshop plug-in for using PNG (“ping”) files. It is faster than Adobe’s own PNG plug-in and saves considerably smaller PNGs. PNG is an open source file format that supports tight lossless compression. It can be read on any platform by most graphics applications and is fully supported by all modern web browsers.

High Pass Sharpening

This plugin sharpens photos with the classic high pass method. The user can adjust the high pass filter radius, and control the blending with the original image. A high pass output preview is also available to help the user adjust the filter radius up to the point the edges to be sharpened show up.

Photoshop black-white conversion plugin

This is a powerful plugin which is very useful to Black and White conversion.It takes total control over the tonal response of Red, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue and Magenta, and the intermediate hues. The user can boost each color’s tonal response all the way up to white or limit it down to black, without affecting the other colors at all . The plugin offers presets that accurately simulate the tonal response of the most popular b/w films. The plugin can introduce a grain effect of controllable intensity and density.

EdgeWorks – Cool Artistic Styles

It’s a free photoshop plug-in with 20 effects for creating dramatic edge and colour 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.

SwapShop – Colour Exchange

A single Photoshop-compatible plug-in with 15 effects for switching the colour values in your images. Useful for experimenting with interesting combinations and creating surreal results.

Maximum Colour Toning Adobe Plugin

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

Fur 2 – free photoshop plugin

The plugin Fur 2, disperse a simple figure (line or circle, configurable dimensions/thickness) over the whole image. Solid: The figure is filled with a single color (determinated by the figure’s center).180 deg: Image source content is kept; but rotation of 180 degrees around the figure’s center is performed.

Artistic Grain and mezzo style generator

This plugin is used for creating a selection of simple grain and mezzo styles. Give your photos a new look with these various effects.

Selective Saturation – Photoshop Plug-in

Quite often some parts of a photo require a saturation adjustment while others do not. If we increase the saturation globally, the most saturated parts get over saturated and if we decrease it, the less saturated parts get under saturated. So this Free photoshop plugin will definetly help designers to create saturation effect only in specific areas.

Soft Focus – Free Photoshop Plug-in

This plugins applies a soft focus effect, which is often usefull 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.

Contrast Mask – Free Photoshop Plugin

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.

Gradient Blur- Free Photoshop Plugin

This plugin apllies a gradient blur that can help us draw the viewes attention to the photograph’s main subject.There are sliders to control the position where the blur starts and it’s strength.

Xpose – Photoshop plugin to adjust exposure

Xpose is an exposure adjustment plugin. It was written to offer quick adjustment of highlights and shadows with a rapid preview feedback and a simple, intuitive interface. With just a few sliders you can attain better exposure of your digital photos

DepthDither provides color dither for Photoshop

Graphest DepthDither is a free filter plug-in for Photoshop, it mainly concerns on generating color dither in Photoshop. When you wants to use the image on LCD screen, such as mobile phone, the color depth is not 24 bit, and mostly it’s 16 bit. If the image fills with gradient colors, the screen will display color steps, not continuous color.If you use the DepthDither to process the image, the result on PC and on mobile phone will be the same. DepthDither uses 3 ways to make the image seems to be continuous when the color is below 24 bit. It’s just like Photoshop, provides diffusion, pattern and noise as the dither modes.

Lens Correction – Free Photoshop Plug-in

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 .

Virtual Photographer – Photoshop Plugin

Save hours of time by instantly applying photographic effects to
digital images with just one click. It has more than 200 onclick preset effects. Easily applies layered effects with “Blend” mode

AAA BLENDER Photoshop plugin

This filter allows you to open a mask, texture, grunge, or paint layer and blend it with your image in any of 30 blend modes. You can even use it to simulate layers by blending it with the original or a modified version of the image you are editing. It’s quick and easy!

AAA Gaussian Blur – Photoshop Plugin

This filter offers some Gaussian blur filter options. Color Blur will blur the colors without changing luminosity (lightness) values. You may also invert and blur the colors without inverting the luminosity.

Filter Forge Freepack 1 – Metals

A set of seven photorealistic metal textures and effects. Metallizing effects, alien-looking or industrial metallic surfaces, rust or aluminum foil, and more – all filters are fully adjustable and support seamless tiling.

Photo Effects Photoshop Plugin

A set of seven photo enhancing effects. Give your photos a sunny style, apply grunge look or color tints, age the image, and more – all filters are fully adjustable and resolution-independent.

Frame Maker – Free photoshop Plugin

A set of seven filters that create frames for your photos. Apply a realistic painted wooden frame or a vignette, give your photos a classic elegant feel or a ragged harsh look, and more.

Distortions – photoshop plug-in

A set of seven filters that can reshape, distort and deform the source image in various creative ways. The filters can break the image into abstract fragments, generate bubbly effects, apply waves or ripples, and more.

Camouflage photoshop plugin

Use the Camouflage plug-in to make army, fashion and animal camo. You can even make patterns not found anywhere else.You can control up to eight color layers. We’ve included a big set of examples, which you can select from within the plug-in. Amongst them are real army colors, both old and new. Many common fashion colors are also included as well as a few animal colors.

Night-Vision photoshop Plugin

The NightVision plug-in can make any image 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 camera or CCTV system. 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. You can even use it to enhance real night images!

Snowflakes photoshop plugin

With the Snowflakesâ„¢ plug-in, you can make it snow any time of the year, any place you want.You can control all aspects of a snow; both the minimal and maximal size of the snowflakes, whether it’ll be soft snowflakes or hail, the amount of snowflakes falling down and even the color of the snowflakes.

Snowscape – cover any landscape with snow

With the SnowScapeâ„¢ plug-in you can add layers of snow to images simply by letting the snow fall down. You decide which areas the snow should fall down on by making the rest of the image transparent, you then start the plug-in, configure how much and where the snow should fall, and SnowScape does the rest.You can also use SnowScape to do similar effects; make the snow less sticky, and you can create hills of sand. Apply it up-side down with high stickiness, and the ooze will be dripping down from your image.

Harmonix – Make waves!

With the Harmonix Photoshop plug-in, you can mix harmonic frequencies into complex waves. Harmonix renders a single, horizontal line on the 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 change the up to ten harmonic frequencies in both amplitude (volume/height) and phase (offset/shift) and have precise control over the base frequency.

UnPlugged-X – Over 100 effects in one plug-in

UnPlugged X is a collection of over 100 different filter effects wrapped into a single plug-in. Combining all those effects into a single plug-in allows you to use them in ways not possible with separate effects. With UnPlugged-X, the whole is larger than the sum of the parts.

FilterOptix – free photoshop plugin

Filters are an essential part of your photographic equipment. They help you to correct or embellish the colors of a scene, put people or objects in the center of attention, bring out the beautiful contrast in a stormy sky or make that wedding picture extra romantic. In short; no photographer either professional or amateur can do without lens filters.

ImageSkill Outliner photoshop plugin

Outliner is a Photoshop-compatible plug-in for Windows designed by ImageSkill Software that can work as with commercial software like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop Elements, Corel (Jasc) Paint Shop Pro, Microsoft Digital Image Suite as free like software IrfanView, XnView.

Background Remover – Photoshop Plugin

With this free photoshop plugin you can easily remove the background images from your photos.Background Remover is a Photoshop-compatible plug-in for Windows designed by ImageSkill Software that can work with Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop Elements, Corel Paint Shop Pro, Macromedia Fireworks etc. The main purpose of the Background Remover is to extract some part of an image i.e. ‘the object’ and remove part that which is unwanted.

Auto FX – Dreamy Photo Photoshop Plug-in

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. After you have downloaded the software, enter in your e-mail address in the download page to receive serial number to activate the plugin.

Turn your images into Mosaic photoshop plug-in

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.

Iridescent photoshop plug-in

The Digital Artshop’s Iridescent filter will apply a pearl like effect to your image. The effect is fully controlable with sliders for the amount of reflections, colour strength, smoothing and a detail enhancer.

Stereogram Lab Filter photoshop plug-in

Stereogram Lab Filter allows to generate Hidden Image Stereograms right in your Photoshop, which is quite convenient. This filter is free and you can use it both for commercial and non-commercial purposes, however, distributing the filter itself is not allowed.

Mosaic Toolkit & Illumination Fix Toolkit

Mosaic Toolkit applies mosaic effects to photos and other images. It provides several mosaic styles, e.g. Squares, Rings, Balls, Gears, Square Rings, Stars, Daisy and All Styles. You can vary cell size and contrast, color tweak cells, ball glow and brightness and blend the effect with the original photo. There are gradient, radial gradient, color inversion and a row shift brickwork effects.

Kaleidoscope photoshop plugin

Kaleidoscope 2.1 is a plugin which proceeds to multiple symmetries to obtain beautiful patterns.

Sorting Tiles photoshop plugin

Sorting Tiles imitates vaguely painting. Fundamentally, the filter cuts image in several blocks, makes a sorting of colours, and redistributes these ones following more or less complicated patterns.

Chalkaholic photoshop plugin

Chalkaholic renders chalk and charcoal type effects with artistic panache and flair. Providing uniquely effective artistic rendering options, Chalkaholic is the essential addition to any digital artist’s effects collection.

Weaver photoshop plugin

Weaver is an effect which imitates weave.

JuliJulia ’s curves photoshop plugin

JuliJulia ’s curves are a family of mathematical curves (fractals) renowned for their beauties. This plugin is extremely simple : to track down an interesting curve, use the Julia control or press the Random button (that’s all !). Besides, it allows endless zooming, to customize colours, and to save settings.a ’s curves photoshop plug-in

3D Shadow : Adobe Photoshop plug-in

This handy tool 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 some others. Even the seasoned designers are surprised by the simplicity of the plug-in and excellent results it generates. The text, processed with this tool immediately grabs the attention of the viewers.

Sinedots photoshop plugin

With sinedots plugin you can create sine wave patterns in your design works.

Shear photoshop plugin

This is a conversion of the AfterFx Shear Effect to my new Photoshop framework. A new feature is that a possible (feathered) Selection is now used to alter the strength Parameter locally. This results in some interesting distortions. Compatibility issues are the same as for SinedotsII.

Retro Dots – free photoshop plugin

It generates dot grids which can be based on selections. It’s will help beginners to create colorful dot patterns easily with one click.

Blots free photoshop plugin

With 3 modes: normal, camouflage & gradient, this plug-in is very ideal to create textures using blots.

Color MegaMix free photoshop plug-ins

Color MegaMix modifies the colors of any image. It is based on two rows of colors: 8 source colors and 8 target colors. According to these data, the plugin reconstructs completely the color space.

Eraser Genuine – erase certain parts of images

Eraser Genuine modifies image transparency according to two criteria: a colour you wish to erase and a colour you wish to protect. So, this plugin is particulary suitable for images where two colours oppose clearly.

Fine Threshold free photoshop plugins

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

Flat Median photoshop plugin

Flat Median is a median-like effect which have some advantages over the “regular” median filter.

Icon Plugin for Photoshop

Icon Plugin for Photoshop enhances Adobe Photoshop with an ability to export and import Windows icons (.ico). Thanks to this ability, users can create compelling icons directly in Adobe Photoshop, using its large arsenal of creative tools and a convenient and familiar design environment.

Photo Freebies – 10 best photoshop plugins

PhotoFreebies is a collection of free plugins for performing useful photo manipulations and effects e.g. sepia effects, saturation gradients, b/w conversion, color space transformations and many more. Some of them have a dialog with adjustable controls whereas others are applied instantly without displaying a dialog.

• B/W
• Sepia
• Luma Negative
• Chroma Negative
• RGB2YCC and YCC2RGB
• RGB2HSL and HSL2RGB
• Desaturation Gradient
• Histo Fix
• Remove Transparency

DeNoise’s Noise Reduction

This plug-in provides 4 noise reduction algorithms, including low-pass, bilateral, adaptive bilateral and low frequency. These methods, used separately or in combination, provide an excellent tool for the serious photographer who runs up against electronic noise.

Greyscaler photoshop plugin

This plugin can be useful in bringing out hidden detail in the picture or isolating individual channels. In additon there are the more usual controls for Contrast, Brightness and a Depth (pseudo gamma) control.

xMeta photoshop plugin

xMeta is a simple set of three plug-ins for exporting metadata from Photoshop in raw binary form. ICC Profiles are of particular interest, as they can be added to the ColorSync profiles folder or opened by applications such as Ãœbercolor.

Melt photoshop plugin

This plugin allows to deform image, by waves. Size, intensity, and aspect ratio of waves are customizable.

Projection photoshop plugin

The plugin Projection provides a collection of interactive perspective effects: ability to tile image in infinite space (copy or mirror mode), or to repeat edges.

Posterizer photoshop plugin

Posterizer is a plugin which offers the possibility to posterize the luminosity and the hue.

Autointerlace Create interlace effects

Autointerlace is a nifty little plugin which automatically creates interlaced effects on an image. Interlacing (sometimes known as scanline graphics) is an effect similar to what you see on a television screen, and is used in modern print media design and graphics to give a “techno” style.

j2k – the future of image compression

j2k is a free Photoshop and After Effects plug-in set for reading and writing the JPEG 2000 file format, the successor to JPEG.Also known as JP2, JPEG 2000 uses wavelet compression as opposed to the DCT compression used in standard JPEG. The end result is better image quality in a smaller file. JP2 also includes mandatory metadata such as information about an image’s color space.

20 free photoshop plugins from Flaming Pear

This is a collection of 20 free photoshop plugins developed by Flaming pears. It includes :

• SuperBladePro
• Melancholytron
• Flood
• Flexify 2
• Designer Sextet
• Mr. Contrast
• Polymerge
• LunarCell
• India Ink
• Hue and Cry
• Glitterato
• SolarCell
• Photography Pack
• Patterns
• Free Plugins

24 Free Photoshop Plug-ins By Richard Rosenman

Free photoshop plugins developed by Richard Rosenman.

• 3D Sphere Generator
• 3D Sphere Generator
• Channel Modifier
• Color Bar Generator
• Diffuse
• Evaluate
• Grain Generator
• Grid Generator
• Lens Distortion Corrector

42 photoshop plugins by Xero Graphics

These are all freeware, and were built using Filtermeister, with Paint Shop Pro 8.10 as the host program – they should work without problems with any Windows graphics program that supports the Adobe Photoshop plugin architecture.

• Abstractor
• Alien Mist
• Artgrain
• Artifax
• Artworx
• Bad Dream
• Caravaggio
• Clarity
• Cubism
• Duochrome
• Emphasis
• Fritillary
• Fuzzifier
• Greyscaler
• Greytinter
• Illustrator
• Improver
• Iridium
• LineArt
• Lithograph
• Make-a-Flake
• Mistifier
• MoodLight
• Moonlight

Hope This collection of free photoshop plugins will definitely help all beginners out there to create their desired effects in images easily. If you have came across any plugin collections then do let me know. I will add that link to this list with a link to your blog.