Category: Photoshop Plugins

Photography / Photoshop Plugins

Fisheye-Hemi Plug-In Lens Distortion Correction

I tend to only use a fisheye lens when I want to distort an image, but there are times when you might use a fisheye lens for other purposes. For instance, say you want to capture everyone in a room in the same photo, but your lens doesn’t have a wide enough angle or you simply can’t move far enough away from your subject. The fisheye effectively shoots to the corners in those scenarios, with the downside being you get a warped image. Fisheye-Hemi plug-in to the rescue! Shoot with your fisheye lens to get everything in the shot, then use the software to ‘fix’ the image and make everyone look normal. In most cases you can get the image to appear as if you started with the correct camera lens in the first place. This is made by the same people who do ShineOff and PearlyWhites. [Windows XP/Vista $29.95]

Before Fisheye-Hemi

Fisheye Hemispheric Distortion Correction

After Fisheye-Hemi

Fisheye Hemispheric Distortion Correction

Downloads / Photoshop Plugins / Shareware

ShineOff – Facial Glare Fixing for Photoshop

If you’ve ever noticed unnaturally shiny skin in your photos, you may have also wondered how the heck you can fix it. This is usually caused by a combination of slight perspiration from the person reflecting the harsh light of a camera flash back at the image sensor. In extreme cases, shiny skin may be due to solarization in the image. While you can avoid this altogether using diffused light, sometimes you need a fix. ShineOff is among the best plugins I’ve tried for removing shine from skin tones of all hues. It automatically softens the skin in shiny areas to create a more natural looking skin tone. Unlike trying to apply filtering myself in Photoshop, ShineOff seems to leave the sparkle in teeth and eyes, while toning down unwanted shine on skin, giving photos a more polished look. Batch convert a series of images to reduce shine or work on one image at a time. If you have a tool like the full version of Photoshop with Action support, you can combine this with PearlyWhites Teeth Whitening to complete two image tweaking tasks at once. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $49.95]

Downloads / Photoshop Plugins / Shareware

PearlyWhites – Teeth Whitening Photoshop Plugin

Bleaching your teeth is both expensive and likely not a healthy solution for having white teeth in photos. Color correction is a much more cost effective solution and it works on everyone with no trips to the dentist. There are ways to achieve white teeth in Photoshop through a combination of built-in tools, but I find it much faster to use a plugin built specifically for the task of making teeth white. Enter PearlyWhites from Image Trends. Install the plugin for use with Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, or any other app that supports the Photoshop plugin method and you’ll get great looking teeth in every photo. Support for one off fixes or batch fixing of all teeth in a series of photos is supported. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $49.95]

Downloads / Freeware / Photoshop Plugins

Face Control Photoshop Plugin

Face Control from Redfield plugins is a Photoshop compatible plugin for making modifications to facial expressions and tweaking the overall appearance of someone in a photo. For slight tweaks, like making a smile a little stronger, you can get decent results. For more dramatic effects, the adjustment gets a bit strange. I generally prefer my Photoshop filters to have a more granular level of control, but for a quick way to take a few pounds off someone’s face, or tweak their smile just a little, Face Control isn’t too bad. The biggest downside to the tool is that it doesn’t deal well if you select part of a busy background when doing the tweak. Also, you need to preselect the section of the photo you want to tweak before opening the filter or you alter the entire image. You can see a sample before and after image below. Compatible with Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Paint Shop Pro and any other app that supports Photoshop compatible plugins. [Windows 2k/XP/Vista $0.00]


Downloads / Freeware / Photography / Photoshop Plugins / Premium

Water Ripples Plugin

Creating realistic water ripples in photos can be a trick when trying to simply manipulate the features of your photo editing app. It’s much easier to find a plugin to do all the heavy lifting. Redfield created the aptly named Water Ripples plugin to help with this exact problem, providing plenty of customizable effects to tweak the perfect water ripple in your outdoor photography. If you don’t want spend the time customizing, a randomization feature gets you most of the way there without fine-tuning. Also check out their Craquelure plugin and Sketch Master manipulation tool for further image editing ease. All plugins use the Photoshop compatible architecture, which works with most image editors. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]

Downloads / Freeware / Photography / Photoshop Plugins / Premium

virtualPhotographer

Photoshop and Photoshop Elements pack so many filters and presets into the core application it seems like there’s no need for plugins anymore. Despite all the presets, I continue to find plugins with features extending far beyond the basics. virtualPhotographer extends the core configurations of mundane things like B/W conversion, making it simple to flip to grayscale or any single color variation. The plugin also offers around 50 presets tweaking soft focus and contrast settings, as well as some slick artistic effects. The image tweaks provided in virtualPhotographer are possible using built-in components in Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro, but using the plugin makes it easier. Compatible with any app supporting Photoshop-compatible plugins. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]

Downloads / Photoshop Plugins / Premium

David Blend Filters

Thirteen plugins to turn your digital images into magical works of beauty (or something like that). Three Frosted Edger plugins provide varying degrees of frosting and curvature of your image edges. Three Gradient Sky plugins work to enhance various colors over your skyline shots, depending on what you hope to highlight. Two tile creators, and two frames make for some interesting image displays, while a Highlight Correction dims those excessively bright spots in your images. The final two plugins take dark areas of your image with transparency for making composites. These plugins work with any app supporting Photoshop-compatible plugins. [Windows 9x/2k/XP $0.00]

Photoshop Plugins

Xero Plugins

The Plugin Site tipped me off to this great collection of free Photoshop plugins. 9 selections perform tasks like cleaning up washed out skies (skycleaner), adding moonlight effects (moonlight), seasonal color manipulation (seasons), and an interesting mist effect (alienmist). The plugins were actually designed using Paint Shop Pro, so fans of that program should feel confident that they’ll find compatibility. An interesting collection of wallpapers is also available in addition to the plugins.