The Adobe Photoshop is a king of image editors. But tere are thousands of plugins provide new functionality or  simplify the processing. Sure, much of them are commercial products, but in depths of Internet you can found enough of free-of-charge plugins and filters.

1. VirtualPhotographer is a  plug-in that allows you to create a variety of photographic styles with the greatest of ease. VirtualPhotographer features many presets, all of which can be fine tuned to fit your requirements. Effects such as Film Grain, Soft Focus, B/W, B/W tinting, High Contrast etc. are all just a click away. No more struggling to get to grips with the steep learning curve of your photo editor. Great results are just a mouse click away.

Compatible with Photoshop®, Photoshop® Elements, Paint Shop™ Pro®, Photo-Paint and other popular imaging applications.

2. Harry's Filters is a free Photoshop-compatible plugin containing up to 69 different image effects. They were formerly also known under the name "VideoRave".

Harry's Filters 3.0 lets you choose the appropriate effect without hassling through different menus and dialogs. The main effect categories are called Color, Artistic, Gradients, Patterns, Warp, Noise, En/Decrypt, Other and Nature. They include filters for changing the image color or mood, for creating artistic effects, producing colorful gradients or impressive patterns, warping images and adding special noise effects to image. Additionally they let you encrypting and decrypting images with 64 bit keys, produce zoom, mirror or paint effects as well as natural effects like lightning, tornado and polar lights.

Harry's Filters is very easy and comfortable to use. It can be applied to RGB as well as Grayscale images. A Jump button lets you create interesting random effects and explore the possibilities of each filter effect. Options for saving and opening effect presets allow the user to store his favorite effects and reuse them later. An Instant Preview check box updated the preview while you drag the sliders.

New in Version 3.0 is a Play feature that produces animations with random parameters at a certain frame rate and speed. The animations provide an impressive demonstration of the effects of the different filters and are an easy way to discover interesting effect settings.

This filter is compatible with long list of image editors

3. JPEG Enhancer.  As everyone knows, JPEG (.jpg) image compression doesn't save all the information in an image. It compresses images so consume only a small amount of disk space (e.g. compared with .bmp), but also damages them with a "blotchy look" and "JPEG artifacts". Most graphics editors have JPEG as a default format. And almost all digital photo cameras save images in JPEG format.

Jpeg Enhancer is a simple and extremely powerful program that lets you restore the images damaged by low-quality JPEG compression.

It uses a unique technique that allows even novices to remove the so-called "JPEG artifacts" and the "blotchy look" from their images easily, quickly and effectively.

Unlike all other tools, our science-intensive technology doesn't damage your photos simply by blurring them, but restores them, so your images will look as they did before being damaged by JPEG compression!

Jpeg Enhancer is the only product on the market able to restore compressed JPEG images smartly.

Jpeg Enhancer is useful for everyone who works with JPEG images. It's a must for design studios and publishers as well

4- Auto FX Dreamy Photo - 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.

Last update: 18-03-2008 16:40