Despite Photoshop's unrivaled feature set, everyone has a few extra things that they wish the app could do (especially web designers). Fortunately, Photoshop has a rich community of third party developers who are regularly churning out fantastic plugins and extensions to add all kinds of functionality. From faster image exporting to better guide control, here are 25 outstanding Photoshop plugins you should try.
Stop getting stuck with boring patterns or having to craft your own. With Super Spray, you can turn any .png images into a spray pattern. All you have to do is import the picture with the plugin.
Get high-resolution screenshots of your full screen or selected areas in a snap. Just choose where to save, how to save it and take the screen shot.
This amazing timesaver plugin allows you to rename multiple layers at the same time, use find and replace in naming layers, live name filtering and autocompleting from a list of used names. This is an essential tool for easy name changes and editing.
This Photoshop Extension will cut your time making design mockups and wireframes in half. It comes with loads of UI staples (buttons, sliders, comment boxes, icons, etc) in a variety of styles and colors. With just a few clicks, you can whip up a beautiful prototype of an entire web page.
Get precise measurements fast. SpecKing gives you measurements of each layer with one click, or if you have multiple objects on a flat layer, you can use the selection tool to measure them.
This plugin allows you to quickly export any vector shapes to SVG files. You simply target a single layer or any group of layers, hit a button, and you're ready to go. If you're looking for a solution to reduce your file's actual size, we rounded up a great list of tips here.
Portraiture features best-in-industry skin smoothing algorithms and is a must-have for any professional portrait photographer. It's hard to find a tool that has such impressive results with such little effort. At $200, it's not cheap, but if you make your living as a photographer, it's definitely worth the expense.
Transform Each allows you to transform multiple layers at once, but in a way that makes each item independent from the rest. This is great for resizing a group of objects without screwing up their positions. Curious to learn about other common Photoshop fails? We spent some time going over those here.
Font Awesome is one of the most popular icon fonts on the market and this plugin brings all those awesome icons into an easy-to-access Photoshop panel.
Ink allows you to include subtle information about crucial details like layer styles, text formatting and layer measurements.
CSS Hat takes your Photoshop layers and gives you clean CSS code instantly. Photoshop now has similar functionality built in, but in my experience, CSS Hat is much more robust.
GuideGuide is the single best way to quickly lay down a complex guide arrangement in Photoshop. Like some of the other panels on this list, Photoshop has now added similar functionality, but I prefer GuideGuide's interface, and since it's free, why not give it a shot?
Subtle Patterns is one of the best sources online for free, simple background patterns. This plugin saves you countless trips to the website and puts the huge, ever-growing library of patterns right in your Photoshop.
Size Marks is another useful tool for quickly placing measurement information onto your PSDs. Simply draw a box with the Marquee tool, hit a keyboard shortcut, and you're done.
Make your social media site attractive with these great templates for Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and more.
PNG Hat brings a ton of really robust image exporting features to Photoshop. It features excellent image compression and the ability to generate CSS, HTML, and even Objective C to embed your images into whatever project you're working on.
Yet another amazing plugin from Source's 'Hat' line. iOS Hat is an essential tool for iOS developers that quickly converts Photoshop layers into Objective-C or Swift code.
This plugin goes through and groups your layers for you. It alerts you to any problems and gives you a simple fix instead of trudging through layers.
If you're a UI designer, you've come up against this problem tons of times: you're designing your app and you need some sample avatars for your comps. With Random User, great placeholder avatars are a single click away.
LayerCraft is a great little toolkit for preparing and exporting images. There are a few quick scripts like for trimming and scaling, as well as export options for 1x, 2x, and 3x size graphics.
Another mockup tool similar to WebZap. The elements that it creates are less-styled than with WebZap, which is good for generic wireframes that you can add your own style and colors to.
Layrs is a tool that helps your clean up your messy PSDs with seven useful scripts. It was created by Creative Market shop owner Vadim Sherbakov.
Let's face it, if you have a ton of fonts, Photoshop's interface for sifting through them pretty much sucks. Font Hero allows you to search, preview, and organize fonts better than ever before, right inside Photoshop.
A powerful panel for photographers that allows you to quickly adjust colors, soften skin, and apply various professional-level effects to your images.
Fixel Contrastica helps you effortlessly increase the local and global contrast in your images. The tool works without clipping pixels and gives you full control over tonal range.
Bonus! Whether you need to create responsive grids, measure columns with margins, or just find the middle of things, GuideGuide has tools that makes working with Photoshop and Illustrator guides painless. Every feature works with your document, artboard, and even your current selection, so that you can add—or remove—exactly the guides you want.
These 26 Photoshop plugins should be enough to supercharge your workflow. Head over to this great list of tutorials if you want to learn to achieve more with this powerful tool. If we missed any of your favorite plugins, leave a comment below and let us know.
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Download these worksheets and start practicing with simple instructions and tracing exercises.
Photoshop is already a powerful and versatile app, but you can make it even more powerful, more versatile, and easier to use with Photoshop Add-Ons.
Photoshop Add-Ons theoretically come in two flavors, Extensions and Plug-ins, although the differences are mainly behind the scenes. Both do much the same thing: they either add new functionality to Photoshop—like better HDR processing or the ability to export layers to CSS—or make it simpler to use Photoshop’s existing feature set—like panels that group together a load of retouching actions or create lots of specific layers or masks at once.
Photoshop add-ons vary hugely in scale. Some are simple, one button panels that get added to your interface. Others are stand-alone, fully featured editing apps that hook into Photoshop. Let’s have a quick look at the two ends of the spectrum.
Lumizone is a plug-in panel that makes it easy to select and mask different areas of your images based on how light or dark they are. In the image below, I’ve turned all the darkest shadow areas green. You can see how the highlights—even in the shadow areas—are left untouched. While it’s possible to do this in Photoshop without Lumizone or a similar plug-in, it’s a lot more work.
At the other end of the scale, Luminar is a full photo editor in its own right, but you can use it as a Photoshop plugin. When you edit an image in Photoshop, you can send it to Luminar, make some changes, and then send it back to Photoshop with those changes applied. Here, we’re editing an image in Luminar’s plugin.
And here’s the same image back in Photoshop ready for further edits.
If we’re being a little general in describing add-ons, it’s because there’re thousands of them available. Adobe lets developers integrate deeply with Photoshop using a variety of different scripting languages and methods so there are almost no limits to what they can do.
You’re most likely to run into Photoshop add-ons when you search Google for a way to do something quickly or more efficiently. For example, Adobe kind of missed the boat (or more like, totally ignored the boat) on the filter-editing movement inspired by Instagram. Photoshop’s built-in Filter Gallery is, honestly, a throwback to the 90s.
Other developers have stepped up to add this functionality to Photoshop. Luminar, Color Effex Pro, Filter Forge, and dozens of other apps add intuitive filter based editing. If you need the power of Photoshop but want certain kinds of adjustments to be more straightforward and more repeatable, they’re a great place to start. And as soon as you begin Googling ways to get Instagram filters in Photoshop, you’ll find them.
Similarly, if you’re looking for how to add your photo to a mock book or magazine cover, you’ll probably encounter PSD Covers and their plug-in. If you’re having difficulty doing something in Photoshop, start searching for “[my problem] Photoshop plug-in” and see where that gets you.
Adobe also maintains an (incomplete) list of third-party plug-ins and an (also incomplete) marketplace. You’ll find a mix of free and paid add-ons there. Have a look through and see what catches your eye.
Once you’ve found an add-on, you want to try, download it and work through its specific installation instructions. You usually just have to double-click on an installer, follow a wizard, and restart Photoshop.
In general, you access Photoshop add-ons in one of two ways: from a new panel or through the Filter menu. Let’s take them one at a time.
Before you can use a Photoshop panel based add-on, you need to add it to the interface, since Photoshop does not show all panels by default. With the add-on installed, go to Windows > Extensions and select the panel from the list. You can see I’ve got four add-on panels installed.
RELATED:What to Do If You Can’t Find the Layers Panel (or Any Other Panel) in Photoshop
And just like that, the panel appears, ready for you to use.
Filters work a bit differently. Open the image you plan to send to a plug-in in Photoshop and make any edits you want. You then have two options:
Either way, you’ll end up with a new layer on top of everything, ready to be sent to the plug-in.
Select the layer and then open the “Filter” menu. At the bottom of the list, you’ll see each filter manufacturer whose filters you’ve installed. I have NBP, Nik, and Skylum plug-ins.
Select the plug-in you want to use from the list and Photoshop sends the selected layer to the filter.
Make any edits you want, and when you’re done, click the button that says something like Apply, Done, or Okay—it’s different from filter to filter. All the edits you’ve made are applied, and the merged layer is sent back to Photoshop.
Photoshop is the king for a reason. With add-ons, third-party developers have probably added anything you think is missing.
Photoshop is already a powerful and versatile app, but you can make it even more powerful, more versatile, and easier to use with Photoshop Add-Ons.
Photoshop Add-Ons theoretically come in two flavors, Extensions and Plug-ins, although the differences are mainly behind the scenes. Both do much the same thing: they either add new functionality to Photoshop—like better HDR processing or the ability to export layers to CSS—or make it simpler to use Photoshop’s existing feature set—like panels that group together a load of retouching actions or create lots of specific layers or masks at once.
Photoshop add-ons vary hugely in scale. Some are simple, one button panels that get added to your interface. Others are stand-alone, fully featured editing apps that hook into Photoshop. Let’s have a quick look at the two ends of the spectrum.
Lumizone is a plug-in panel that makes it easy to select and mask different areas of your images based on how light or dark they are. In the image below, I’ve turned all the darkest shadow areas green. You can see how the highlights—even in the shadow areas—are left untouched. While it’s possible to do this in Photoshop without Lumizone or a similar plug-in, it’s a lot more work.
At the other end of the scale, Luminar is a full photo editor in its own right, but you can use it as a Photoshop plugin. When you edit an image in Photoshop, you can send it to Luminar, make some changes, and then send it back to Photoshop with those changes applied. Here, we’re editing an image in Luminar’s plugin.
And here’s the same image back in Photoshop ready for further edits.
If we’re being a little general in describing add-ons, it’s because there’re thousands of them available. Adobe lets developers integrate deeply with Photoshop using a variety of different scripting languages and methods so there are almost no limits to what they can do.
You’re most likely to run into Photoshop add-ons when you search Google for a way to do something quickly or more efficiently. For example, Adobe kind of missed the boat (or more like, totally ignored the boat) on the filter-editing movement inspired by Instagram. Photoshop’s built-in Filter Gallery is, honestly, a throwback to the 90s.
Other developers have stepped up to add this functionality to Photoshop. Luminar, Color Effex Pro, Filter Forge, and dozens of other apps add intuitive filter based editing. If you need the power of Photoshop but want certain kinds of adjustments to be more straightforward and more repeatable, they’re a great place to start. And as soon as you begin Googling ways to get Instagram filters in Photoshop, you’ll find them.
Similarly, if you’re looking for how to add your photo to a mock book or magazine cover, you’ll probably encounter PSD Covers and their plug-in. If you’re having difficulty doing something in Photoshop, start searching for “[my problem] Photoshop plug-in” and see where that gets you.
(I can't tell you where.) Plug in your usb device in your computer. Wii ntsc iso downloads. Click on the WBFS Manager 2.5 icon on your desktop. The first step is to get a Wii iso backup file.
Adobe also maintains an (incomplete) list of third-party plug-ins and an (also incomplete) marketplace. You’ll find a mix of free and paid add-ons there. Have a look through and see what catches your eye.
Once you’ve found an add-on, you want to try, download it and work through its specific installation instructions. You usually just have to double-click on an installer, follow a wizard, and restart Photoshop.
In general, you access Photoshop add-ons in one of two ways: from a new panel or through the Filter menu. Let’s take them one at a time.
Before you can use a Photoshop panel based add-on, you need to add it to the interface, since Photoshop does not show all panels by default. With the add-on installed, go to Windows > Extensions and select the panel from the list. You can see I’ve got four add-on panels installed.
RELATED:What to Do If You Can’t Find the Layers Panel (or Any Other Panel) in Photoshop
And just like that, the panel appears, ready for you to use.
Filters work a bit differently. Open the image you plan to send to a plug-in in Photoshop and make any edits you want. You then have two options:
Either way, you’ll end up with a new layer on top of everything, ready to be sent to the plug-in.
Select the layer and then open the “Filter” menu. At the bottom of the list, you’ll see each filter manufacturer whose filters you’ve installed. I have NBP, Nik, and Skylum plug-ins.
Select the plug-in you want to use from the list and Photoshop sends the selected layer to the filter.
Make any edits you want, and when you’re done, click the button that says something like Apply, Done, or Okay—it’s different from filter to filter. All the edits you’ve made are applied, and the merged layer is sent back to Photoshop.
Photoshop is the king for a reason. With add-ons, third-party developers have probably added anything you think is missing.