25 Best Free Photoshop Plugins for Photographers

Photoshop is, indeed, a powerful tool for editing your photos. But if you want to make sure you maintain consistency in your editing workflow or if you simply want to speed up the editing process, you’ll need a quality Photoshop plugin.

From applying HDR effects to converting your images to black and white, there is a plugin for every situation and in this post, we’ve gathered the best free Photoshop plugins for photographers.

You might also like this collection of free Photoshop plugins for UI designers.

This tool makes it easy to create HDR-like effects for your images instantly. It will increase the dynamic range of the image and sharpen it in a non destructive manner.

This Photoshop extension makes it easy to unleash your creative potential creating cinemagraphs, GIFs, and other animations. You will be able to create still images from a video layer, create video loops, and more.

This resource gives you the 18 Photoshop actions to simulate the look of cinematic effects popularized by movies and television series. Each action contains all the adjustment layers and is non destructive so you retain your original.

Gain access to 18 cool effects and filters to use when editing your images. The plugin includes 8 different filters, 9 different light leak effects, and a film grain effect that you can use immediately.

This Photoshop tint plugin is perfect for adding tints to an image for artistic effect. Quickly apply a range of color tones or convert images into black and white for that retro feel.

Easily retouch skin tones with this plugin. With a 1-click application you can make any skin tone free of blemishes and look beautiful. This is a handy plugin when you want to make all your photos look their best.

This Photoshop plugin gives you access to a set of 4 actions that simulate a double exposure effect. This effect works well with other Photoshop actions you may have installed.

Thanks to this Photoshop plugin, you’ll have the power to perform sub-pixel diffusion effects. With sub-pixel diffusion you can apply this effect when and where you would need to apply antialiasing.

This Photoshop plugin makes it easy to convert your images into an ASCII stylized image. ASCII art works by mapping heavier toned ASCII characters to dark areas of your image and lighter toned ASCII to the lighter areas. Not all images will translate well.

Convert any of your image into a realistic painted look without all the effort. In one click you can transform any image with a resolution size of 1000 to 4000 pixels.

Save time, money and effort with this Photoshop resource. You will be able to quickly apply one of 4 basic anaglyph or 11 experimental anaglyph actions with a simple nondestructive click.

With this Photoshop plugin you will be able to create wonderfully looking fractal designs. Generate eye catching patterns in any color with a little mathematical help and create random fractals or manifest your creative streak with controls for asymmetry and scaling.

This powerful Photoshop plugin will apply a white balance to your images. This makes your photos brighter and have more contrast. Using images shot in a RAW format will produce the best results.

This Photoshop plugin will simulate halftone imagery through the use of dots. The images you create with this plugin can be printed with each color channel independently or all together. You can lock or unlock the color channels for black and whites or creating masks.

With this plugin you will be able to quickly apply a glitched or VHS look to all your photos. Simply install the plugin, load your image and click play on the plugin. You will receive 1 action file, 1 pattern file, 1 file with brushes and instructional PDF.

Use this plugin to achieve special effects for all of your images. Choose from a pinch, push, sine variants, concave and convex versions as well as waves or ripples. This plugin can help you create wonderful pieces of art.

Stylize is a wonderful and artistically based plugin that transforms your images into something that looks painted, water colored, or drawn. With dozens of styles to choose from, this will be a welcome addition to your Photoshop workflow.

With this plugin you will be able to make pixel art out of any of your images. This plugin supports an 8 and 16 bit channels with a color channel mode for professional workflows.

This Photoshop action can be used to create digital artwork in 1 click. This plugin will generate the watercolor art and multiple layers that you can further tweak and customize.

With this plugin you will save time working on backgrounds. Quickly and easily remove the backgrounds, even around challenging edges like hair. Use the layer mask to quickly remove or restore regions of an image.

This plugin will help you generate a grid that you can apply over your photo for easier editing. Each grid is generated as a separate layer so that you can apply the theory behind the Rule of Thirds, Golden Ratio, and Dynamic Symmetry.

Quickly and easily generate a mosaic of randomly sized boxes out of your images. This is a wonderful way to give your images a whole new artistic look. The box fitting tool provides control over how many boxes to create, the maximum size allowed, as well as an option to sample color from the original image or to use custom colors.

Save time with your image editing workflow with this resource highlighting the summer colors. This resource gives you 20 custom summer duotone actions to help get your summer design juices flowing.

This simple but unique plugin allows precise, independent and variable color channel inversion. This will yield impressive results when full control of each channel is used. Choose colors from 8 or 16 bit channels for your project.

If your Photoshop has amassed a large collection of actions and actionsets then you will want to get this launcher. Quickly and easily find all of your actions, sort them through a favorites selection, as well as run the actions right from the launcher.

This Photoshop plugin introduces another high fidelity method of sharpening your images by using highpass frequencies. This is a method used by professionals in the production industry and a technique favored by professional photographers and photo retouchers alike.

This polar projection plugin turns your panorama pictures into their own little worlds. The plugin takes the pain out of the long process to manually morph your panorama images into stereographic projections.

Tych Panel is an extension that automates the creation of triptychs and diptychs. It also offers an easy way to set up your rows and columns for your image placement.

Stock Photo Site Photoshop Plugins

Use this article to fill up your creative library with useful Photoshop plugins that will save you hours of time during the photo-editing process.