25 Photoshop Plugins That Will Blow Your Mind
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.
1. Super Spray
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.
2. Screen Snap
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.
3. Renamy 3 Photoshop Plugin
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.
4. Web Zap
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.
5. SpecKing Photoshop Plugin
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.
6. Zeick Photoshop SVG Export
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.
7. Portraiture
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.
8. Transform Each 2.0
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.
9. Font Awesome
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.
10. Ink
Ink allows you to include subtle information about crucial details like layer styles, text formatting and layer measurements.
11. CSS Hat
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.
12. GuideGuide
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?
13. Subtle Patterns
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.
14. Size Marks
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.
15. Social Kit
Make your social media site attractive with these great templates for Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and more.
16. PNG Hat
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.
17. iOS Hat
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.
18. PSD Cleaner
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.
19. Random User
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.
20. LayerCraft
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.
21. Velositey
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.
22. Layrs
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.
23. Font Hero
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.
24. Retouching Panel
A powerful panel for photographers that allows you to quickly adjust colors, soften skin, and apply various professional-level effects to your images.
25. Fixel Contrastica 2 PS
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.
26. GuideGuide for Photoshop
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.
What Are Your Favorite Photoshop Plugins?
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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Does Creative Market still have a photoshop plugin?
@Derek - Creativenauts with all the recent changes in Adobe CC, it's no longer functioning properly, and I don't think it's currently on the roadmap to be revitalized.
@Josh Johnson gotcha, was just wondering because I always thought it was a really cool tool. Sucks that there had to be such a big overhaul with Adobe CC.
Excellent! Will definitely try these out
"Will" is spelled incorrectly in the header of this article ;)
Awesome Plugins, I have tried Velositey, Web Zap, Layrs, Subtle Patterns & Guide Guide.
You can also find some other useful plugins here :
http://pspanels.com/
http://www.cutandslice.me/
LMFAO … #17: was iOS "hate" really a freudian slip?
SpecKing by @Wuwa Corp and Zeick by @Renamy are awesome.
Here is a phenomenal Photoshop script that I use every day to sequentially renumber layers:
http://blog.kam88.com/en/group-layer-renaming-script.html
Viveza by Nik is another of my favorites. Great list here, thanks!
This is a great list! I'm going to try PSD Cleaner. I'm pretty good at keeping my Photoshop files organized but curious how this works. Thanks for the useful article!
Any suggestions for more "custom shapes" libraries and where to find those? Thank you. :)
Great plugins! You should try a new Photoshop design specs plugin named Markly http://marklyapp.com
Interesting and Awesome work.Thanks.
Thanks for these tools! Such an awesome resource.
Absolutely fantastic. Well written, clean, newsworthy. I look forward to more in the future. Thank you!
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Nice to be on such honored list,
Thank You.
By the way, Fixel Contrastica 2 PS (And all the rest) are Photoshop CC 2015 compatible.
Super Plugins. Thank You!
i will try it. thks.......
There's a lot of useful plugins here (although some of them doesn't work with latest versions of Photoshop longer). I'm missing extensions that makes it easier to work with the flow from Photoshop design to social media like twitter and Instagram though. It would be nice to see some of them (if they exist!). I know one tool that I like to use that's for free
www.ps2insta.com
It let's me post my design to Instagram instead of first emailing it to me and then using the Instagram app to post it. I have only tested it with Photoshop CC 2014 so I don't know if it works for older versions. One neat feature is that it can resize the canvas to make it square before I hit the post button :)
Oh wow! I have never heard of some of these! Thanks for the info.
All of tools are very important and helpful also.
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All good and nice, however. Be carefull when purchasing the Font Hero photoshop plugin, because, after making payment you dont get the licence right away. I dont know why. I bought it half an hour ago, no reply from the developer, no licence code, no nothing. Hope its not a hoax.
Thank you for sharing the list of plugins. Check out http://www.knowband.com/ to get the best plugins for your OpenCart, Prestashop and Magento website.
Thank you for your comprehensive list - having read these I thought I'd add mine too. I've been developing professional Photoshop plugins that have become very popular, aimed at 3D artists and photographers for over a decade. In particular, Ultraflares - http://richardrosenman.com/shop/ultraflares/ has become a best seller for photorealistic lens flares. I also have many freeware ones that I've contributed to the community. Feel free to check them out at http://richardrosenman.com
fresh in CreativeMarket store
https://creativemarket.com/alphaplugins/1417982-AlphaPlugins-FireFor
Wow, amazing!
I bought Super Spray when he first came out with it and I LOVE IT. For the Design work I do, PSD Dude is on my top list of 5 action designers. I love the way I can modify or change something to fit with what I am designing and the uniqueness of his work fits with my quirky ideas. No matter what I am designing, I know he will have an action that I can utilize - I got so bored with actions that only give you one result - which is not to say that other actions are boring but that I get tired of seeing the same action generated and/or assisted design suddenly flooded everywhere. I also look forward to his tutorials. ---- BTW, I noticed somewhere in these comments that those designers that are always on top of the latest Photoshop version are frustrated when he can't use some of the great older actions because of missing DLL files. -- I get frustrated when I can't use some of the newer actions because just can't update all the time and I'm not fond of the "cloud" thing which is just a subscription. I prefer to buy an actual software product for many reasons, but that is me. [Okay, by a show of hands, how many know in their gut that they could have done a better Photoshop job on Obama's birth certificate for a lot less money and would NOT have forgotten to merge the document??? ---