Using a plugin you can solve complicated task much easier and also you can create amazing effects faster and better. If you want to use a a plug-in, simply place it in the presets>plug-ins folder of the Photoshop’s installation folder (creating a folder with a name defining the plug-in & placing the plug-in files inside the folder will make it more organized).

Fur 2

The plugin Fur 2, disperse a simple figure (line or circle, configurable dimensions/thickness) over the whole image.

Water Ripples

Water Ripples is a freeware Adobe Photoshop compatible plug-in filter. The highly realistic water ripples effect designer has numerous options as well as an impressive 3D quality. The random settings generator produces unlimited variations of rippled surfaces.

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.

Snowflakes

You can control all aspects of a snow; both the minimal and maximal size of the snowflakes, whether it’ll be soft snowflakes or hail, the amount of snowflakes falling down and even the color of the snowflakes.

NightVision

The NightVision plug-in can make any image like the ones from night vision goggles. By using the effects in this plug-in, you can make images look like they are from a black & white security camera or CCTV system. It’s also possible to make them look like infra-red photos. Or you can just use the interlace to make an image look like a TV picture. You can even use it to enhance real night images

Selective Saturation

Using the plug-in, you can define a “saturation zone” and apply a saturation to only that area.

Absolute Color

Absolute Color is based on a hue wheel subdivided into 6 sectors of 60 degrees. Choose a sector to restrict the tints of the image to this one.

Fotomatic: Traditional photography filters

A collection of 8 plug-in filters for use with Adobe Photoshop or compatible host applications. They offer a series of effects based on traditional photography equipment and techniques. They are not meant to be complex or exact matches, merely a quick and easy method to achieve results that are similar to what can be produced via conventional non-digital formats. Ideal for the beginner or for those photographers who are just moving over to digital-editing and wish to use effects that seem more familiar, rather than the more “technical” software they may sometimes encounter.

Photowiz BW styler

B/W Styler is a tool for performing impressive black and white conversions, creating traditional b&w effects and visually styling b&w photos. B/W Styler is available as a Photoshop-compatible plugin for Windows and MacOS X as well as a standalone application and Lightroom external editor for Windows. The plugin works in dozens of graphics applications, including Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Paint Shop Pro, Photo-Paint, PhotoImpact and IrfanView. All versions support batch processing and process RGB images with 8-bit and 16-bit/channel. The B/W Styler standalone application supports JPEG, TIFF, PNG, PSD, Camera Raw and DNG image formats among others.

Lens Correction

This plugin corrects barrel and pincushion distortions that many  zoom camera lenses.produce. Just move the sliders to the left to correct barrel distortion, and to the right to correct pincushion. Many thanks to Martin Vicanek  who provided the code for this plugin.

Chromagic: Chroma key software

If you need to extract a single colour from an image background then it doesn’t get much easier than this! Open a photo and click on the colour you want to extract and Chromagic will automatically make it transparent. If you need to extract more colours then click and hold the mouse button while you move over the image.

Gradient Blur

This plugin applies a gradient blur that can help us draw the views attention to the photograph’s main subject.

Bleach Bypass effect

BleachBypass is a Photoshop-compatible plugin filter designed by Red Raw Media to digitally simulate the traditional film “bleach bypass” technique. You would have seen such effects in movies like “Saving Private Ryan” and “Three Kings.

Soft Focus

This plugins applies a soft focus effect, which is often usefull  in portraits or fashion photography. There are controls to adjust the focus softness, the overall strength of the effect and the blending mode of  the overlayed blured image.

Fine Threshold

Unlike the traditional threshold command of Photoshop, the plugin Fine Threshold allows to get quickly, anti-aliased and sharp shapes.