best photoshop plugins

[thirdlegstump]

I only use the built-in stuff.

 

[gsaldivar]

Originally posted by: UglyCasanova
Text manipulation - Illustrator 😛

QFT :thumbsup:😀

 

[myusername]

Unless you have oodles of money to waste, you need to know what it is you are trying to accomplish, and then choose a plugin appropriately.
If you are talking about web - size images, there are a lot of options out there.
If you are talking about making photographic quality prints, there are very, very few quality plugins that will give you the effect you desire.
A good rule of thumb is to automatically discard the idea of any plugin that doesn't have a slick, professional, and modern website. It's not that such a thing is impossible, but facing reality, if a plugin worked, people would buy it and the company would develop their website. If the website is not developed, it doesn't necessarily mean the product is total crap (though it often is), but that someone *else* has a *better* plugin for the same task.
Since you mention sharpening, I will suggest you become familiar with the unsharp mask tool in photoshop. No 3rd party package is going to offer a significantly superior alternative. I only use the word significantly because some people here may have a different opinion on what constitutes image quality - IMO, the mark of quality is not being able to tell for certain that the image was from a digital workflow. You may have different ideals.

 

[drum]

Originally posted by: deathkoba
I only use the built-in stuff.

same here.
and might I add I use it poorly 😀

 

[tami]

Originally posted by: myusername
Unless you have oodles of money to waste, you need to know what it is you are trying to accomplish, and then choose a plugin appropriately.
If you are talking about web - size images, there are a lot of options out there.
If you are talking about making photographic quality prints, there are very, very few quality plugins that will give you the effect you desire.
A good rule of thumb is to automatically discard the idea of any plugin that doesn't have a slick, professional, and modern website. It's not that such a thing is impossible, but facing reality, if a plugin worked, people would buy it and the company would develop their website. If the website is not developed, it doesn't necessarily mean the product is total crap (though it often is), but that someone *else* has a *better* plugin for the same task.
Since you mention sharpening, I will suggest you become familiar with the unsharp mask tool in photoshop. No 3rd party package is going to offer a significantly superior alternative. I only use the word significantly because some people here may have a different opinion on what constitutes image quality - IMO, the mark of quality is not being able to tell for certain that the image was from a digital workflow. You may have different ideals.

thanks for the feedback. it's greatly appreciated. 🙂

i've looked at some photoshop plugin sites that really have awful layouts and do see what to avoid -- i've even checked a bunch of review sites but have no idea where to go next since some of these sites are very dated (e.g. the links to the plugin sites don't work -- company gone under?)

i see a lot of flaming pear stuff around. is that good? photographic effects are really what i'm after, and i know that photoshop built-in plugins are very good -- i just figured that there may be some better ones out there.

but when competing with adobe, i guess not.

 

[myusername]

Originally posted by: tami
i see a lot of flaming pear stuff around. is that good?

The filters of theirs that I tried (probably a year ago) did not impress me as being useful for professional work, but might be suitable for someone looking for a quick/easy way to build some web graphics.
They have updated their webpage since then, so you may want to try a demo of anything that looks interesting to you 😉

photographic effects are really what i'm after, and i know that photoshop built-in plugins are very good -- i just figured that there may be some better ones out there.
but when competing with adobe, i guess not.

For the most part, it's simply the nature of digital image editing - you just can't get good results without effort. There are a lot of filters that ship with adobe that aren't worth using either 🙂 There are some 3rd party alternatives that can be useful, e.g. NoiseNinja but not very many (and I really wouldn't be the one to talk about them - e.g. I have little experience with masking utilities, though I would not be surprised if they have evolved decently by this point in time)

You might want to try looking at the PS forums at adobe.com for more ideas.

 

[Modeps]

Check out Adobe Studio Exchange, there's lots of cool actions on there for text effects and the like.

 

[Anubis]

the AutoFX plugins are great

however i beleive they retail for more then PSCS does