While some have a registration fee and others are offered free by Adobe or independent developers, Photoshop plug-ins do a variety of things, such as creating new image effects or performing actions that might otherwise be impossible. Although Photoshop has a wealth of built-in features, designers and power users sometimes want more, and some plug-ins can help out novices who may otherwise have to wrestle with a confusing series of menus or dialog boxes.

We've assembled our top 10 favorite Photoshop plug-ins, all of which fall within the filters category—by far the most extensive group of plug-ins. Filters are pretty easy to set up in Photoshop. All you have to do is install or copy the filter in Photoshop's Filter folder, and then they'll load whenever Photoshop boots. They can be quickly accessed under the Filters menu.

Our test machine is a PC running Windows XP and Photoshop CS1. All plug-ins we tested are Windows-compatible, and most are Mac OS–compatible too. Many of these filters can also be used for older versions of Photoshop, and even other graphics apps such as Paint Shop Pro or PhotoPaint. The benefit of running a filter on an older version of Photoshop is that you do a better job at extending its capabilities, even if Adobe added those features in later releases. Continued... A great effect you can add to pictures is a light effect, such as by having beams of light shine from a given source in your image. In some cases, this can be done by going through a series of steps in Photoshop. If you download Luce from Antonio Perricone, this becomes much easier.

As with many filter plug-ins, Luce opens up its own window from which you can adjust and modify parameters.

From here you can do a variety of things to your image, such as adjust the magnitude of light, the color of the image, etc. Here's an average-looking picture of some clouds.

Looks like the sun might be hiding behind those clouds, so maybe we should convey that a bit more. You can specify the location of the light source in Luce, which we obviously pinpointed to be behind those clouds. In addition to this, you can also add beams of light to emanate from that light source. A great and photographic effect.

You can also adjust the color of the picture to add different moods. Continued... Flaming pear has a robust selection of plug-ins for both Mac and PC, most of which are commercial. We decided to check out their free package that includes a healthy list of plug-ins: Some are great, some not, some you should gloss over. We've highlighted some that we found were pretty useful.

Accessed from the filter menu in Photoshop, Flaming Pear offers free plug-ins aplenty:

Using this image of a supercomputer, we tinkered around with the different filters to see what cool things might show up.

To add this trippy color to our supercomputer, we used the Lab > haRGB plug-in:

The plug-ins also do a good job using filters that interchange colors:

The Kyoto Color filters brings up a menu where you can adjust hue, saturation, and more. There's also a pull-down menu entitled "Glue" that includes about 50 other image effects you can add to your picture. There's also a random select tool that jumps from one setting to the next if you'd rather have the computer tinker around with different settings for you.

To download the free Mac- and Windows-compatible plug-ins, venture towards the bottom of the flaming pear download page and select free plug-ins. Continued... While dust and scratches can be ironed out with several Photoshop tools such as the clone tool, it doesn't hurt to experiment with a program that is exclusively designed to fix those quirks for you. If you're Photoshop kung-fu isn't strong, this filter is great to have around.

Straight from Polariod.com, this handy Dust and Scratch Removal Utility takes out those pesky dust and scratches that can give an old photo a black eye. The utility is offered for both Mac and Windows.

Launching the plug-in will open up its own utility with settings at your control.

Like some of these filters, the program will automatically adjust the image for you, while often leaving you with controls to adjust the initial modification. The default modification was a bit too much for us, so we eased down the sensitivity. Our Photograph, for instance, of this exciting Sonos ZonePlayer 80 had several scratches, but the utility would rectify any quirk too well to the point of rubbing off the button labels. After easing the sensitivity, we found a happy medium. Selecting "Adaptive Filtering" fixed this problem nicely.

Here we have the original picture, the automatic adjustment pic, and our final version that we tweaked on our own. Notice how the middle pic has some of its labels cleaned off. Oops. Continued... Available at this point for Windows only, Virtual Photographer offers so many features and options to edit and apply effects that it can almost be considered its own standalone program. There are dozens of presets and image modes that you can apply to your image, such as "glamour," "moonlit," "spooky," as well as quite a few black-and-white color presets as well. Each preset will filter in its own different set of parameters that you can adjust the image to your liking.

Here we begin with a picture of an earth simulator supercomputer:

The interface is quite comfortable to work with—with plenty of options as well.

Here we added a bit of a glare and glow to our picture:

And even add an old newspaper look to the picture: And then we played around and swapped colors. Of course, there are several ways to achieve some of these effects in Photoshop without the aid of a filter. But our experience with Virtual Photographer gave us more access to different effects, and easy and quick ways to control our images and change from one setting to the next. Photoshop can at times be a bit slow when changing from different filters. Continued... For some of us, adding borders to our images isn't really a huge ordeal. BorderMania, however, makes it much easier to add borders, frames, embossed images, and so on—20 different ways. Installing the plug-in will dump quite a few filters in the BorderMania filter set.

Selecting a filter will spawn a little popup window that includes different parameters to adjust or tweak your image. Here are some border filters we played around with.

Add frames to your pics. We increased the canvas side so that we wouldn't cut into the image too much.

You can also create picture frames as well. Here's an original picture of a fraidy cat.

Now with a round frame.

There are several filters for creating different sets of buttons.

And now our fearful kitty is immortalized as a button.

As with several free plug-ins, you can fork over some dough for access to even greater BorderMania features. We were only able to find a PC-compatible version of BorderMania. Continued...

Available for both Mac and Windows, Auto FX's Mosaic filter is a great addition to Photoshop's existing mosaic options. The large interface has an attractive design and its sheer size will dominate your Photoshop workspace. If you just happen to have other Auto FX filters installed in Photoshop, the Auto FX software will allow you to access them at any time without closing the existing filter. This way you don't have to relaunch any filters to switch from one to the next.

Acting almost like an independent app, Auto FX's application "DreamSuite" includes many menu options, such as File, Edit, and View.

The Mosaic filter will have relevant controls for creating that picturesque mosaic:

Compared with Photoshop's existing Mosaic filter, Auto FX's Mosaic filter blows it out of the water with far more options:

So you can see that Auto FX's Mosaic lets you add a variety of effects to your images. Here we tinkered around and found some settings we like. We began with a picture of a flower and leaves. Continued... Our second Auto FX plug-in Dreamy Photo is a great tool for achieving a dreamy or glamorous effect in your images. Like Mosaic, the DreamSuite app loads, looking a lot like a different application, with a variety of controls at your fingertips.

Here we start off with a harmless picture of a puppy looking up at us. You can even choose a color to cast over the image for a different look.

We added a bit of a reddish tint to our image. Continued... Harrys Filters from The Plug-in Site includes up to 69 different image effects that are accessible through one little popup window. Two drop-down menus offer plenty of options to choose from. The first menu is entitled "Group," which includes such effects like color, noise, warp, and patterns. When you choose one of these options, the parameter controls change, as does the second menu, entitled "FX." This opens a whole new can of worms with more options. So when we choose the gradients group, we are given a list of options in the FX menu such as "beam," "chaos," "double sphere," "frame," and the list goes on.

After playing with several effects, we came up with some nifty looks:

If you're in the process of tweaking your pic, you can check out what the original image looks like by clicking on the picture preview.

Another interesting feature is the "auto" feature. This allows you to sit back and watch the computer twiddle around with the control settings until you find an image effect you like. You can also press the jump button, which toggles from one effect to the next, without the delay of watching the sliders do their trick. Continued... Little Ink Pot offers three free plug-ins that are quick and simple to use.

With options to adjust an image's stroke size and contrast, we turned this average-looking white tiger into a chalked sketch:

You can also fool around with the Thredgeholder filter, to get a sort of pencil on paper look:

And alas, our poor white tiger goes through another filter, this time looking better with the Xpose! filter. There are several controls with this filter.

There are a few extra controls for the Xpose! filter to make this tiger look its best. Continued... VanDerLee Plug-ins offers four free plug-ins for your Photoshopping pleasure. Of these four, we found the Camouflage and NightVision plug-ins to be most useful. If you just so happen to have a need for this type of image effect, then look no further.

The Camouflage plug-in spawns a menu where you can choose from a variety of different colors (or change those colors with an eyedropper tool), change the pattern, blur the image, and more.

Here's an image with a camouflage pattern in the background. Our intent is to replicate this background with the plug-in.

First things first, we got rid of the background and created a new background layer, with the object in the foreground. We matched the colors from the original picture with the eyedropper tool and did our best to match a similar pattern. Here's what we came up with:

Clearly not perfectly replicated, but not bad either. The background in the original photograph has a bit more perspective with the camouflage being on both the ground and wall, hence giving a more 3D look to it. Our pattern is clearly flat, but we could probably have made it look more like the original if we distorted pieces of the background layer a bit. But we want to focus on exclusively using the camouflage plug-in without tampering too much with the image.

Another plug-in we found to be pretty cool was the NightVision plug-in. Sure, it's not really essential, but it does add a cool effect to your pictures.

We began with a picture of a bear:

And with NightVision added to it.

For our Mac readers, unfortunately we haven't seen the VanDerLee plug-ins available for their favorite platform yet.

Discuss 10 Free Plug-ins to Enhance Photoshop   I had a dream to start my own firm, but I didn't have got enough of cash to do this.... That is known that money makes people free. But what to do when one does not have... Have no enough cash to buy a car? You not have to worry, because that is achievable... >>> Post your comment now!

>>> More Graphics Tools Articles          >>> More By Jeremy Atkinson