14 Best Photoshop Plugins for 2021
Adobe has a monopoly on some of the extremely powerful tools, and Photoshop is one of them. It is a tool that offers something to everyone. You get a giant ocean of features and possibilities with Photoshop. And that is why regardless of your profession or experience, it is a tool that can serve your design, photography, and content needs. But users across the world always find some missing element in Photoshop. Different people have different needs, and that gives birth to the different feature requirements in software.
You may not get everything in one software because it is a common platform that doesn’t satisfy personalized features. But thankfully, there are some great plugins to use in Photoshop for various needs. In this article, we’ve gathered some of the best photoshop plugins for 2021 that can help you make your work a lot easier and better. So let’s check out 14 photoshop plugins with the latest features and functionalities.
1. Fluid Mask:
Fluidmask is a paid plugin that makes a time-consuming task very easy. With photoshop, you get many tools to cut out the images and elements for various purposes. And people who are working in photography or advertising always get tons of work related to cutting out objects. By any method, it is a tedious job. It takes a lot of time and focuses, which can probably be utilized in something else.
So for such people and tasks fluid mask is a blessing. It is a plugin that automatically gets you your cutout with precision and saves you from annoyance. The process is very simple and adaptable, so it’s a must-try plugin to make the basic task lot more effortless.
2. Fontself Maker:
Fontself Maker is a plugin that lets you create your own font style in Photoshop and Illustrator. It is a paid tool, and it comes with unique features. There are people around the world who are constantly working with creative projects and artistic elements. And when they find limited font style in photoshop, sometimes they think about coming up with their own. A personalized font style is an exciting thought for any designer or artist, and this tool allows you to make that.
This plugin has a simple drag and drops features, and you can convert any shape into a character as well. Fonstself Maker has great features, flexibility, and options that help you to get your desired font style easily.
3. Layers Control 2:
When you are working with large and complex projects, you tend to forget about the organization part. Some people are not very good at keeping objects well organized when they are focusing on the work. Layers Control 2 is a plugin that is specially designed for such people. If working with a number of layers is your daily routine, then you must try this plugin. It is an entirely free plugin and helps you to stay organized on the work panel.
It allows you to keep your layers organized and undisturbed. You can optimize your project by removing the unused effects and layers. And many more advantages are there with this plugin. So, an excellent option to keep your project neat and better with layer controls.
4. ON1 Effects:
ON1 Effects is a fantastic plugin to mold your photos the way you like. It has the latest effects, filters, and presets that can help you to make your photos more trendy and stylish. It can work as a standalone application or plugin to make your projects better in Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop, Affinity Photo, Capture One, and Corel Paint Shop Pro. This plugin is an attractive solution for people who are associated with photography and camera.
There are photo effects, custom presets, adjustable gradients, touch-up tools, stack filters, preview, and many more useful features that give you the best photo editing experience. You can create and save your own presets also with this plugin.
5. Portraiture:
If you are a photographer or a person who is constantly dealing with various portraits, you may require a good retouching plugin. And Portraiture is one of the reliable plugins for that. For making your portraits better, you have to follow manual steps, and in photoshop, it can e a tedious job and time-consuming as well. There are many options available in tools, but you might not get very accurate and satisfying results. With Portraiture, you get the best and detailed output.
There are many features involved, and they all are controllable. With the help of this plugin, you can retouch the skin, makeup, and whole appearance of your portraits a lot faster than before.
6. TinyPNG:
As the name suggests, this plugin is explicitly for PNG files. With the help of TinyPNG, you can reduce the size of your PNG files. Sometimes for designers and client managers, it becomes challenging to have small-sized images when the project is large and heavy. When you need to have a compressed PNG size but not the file quality, you need something like this plugin. TinyPNG allows bulk editing as well so you can easily have smaller-sized PNG files with the same image quality. Overall a handy tool for designers and people who are dealing with PNG files.
7. CSS3PS:
CSS3PS is a cloud-based Photoshop plugin that helps you to convert your layers to CSS3. It is a completely free tool that can help developers a lot. It comes with many exciting features as well. And CSS3PS is a cloud plugin, so any update or bug fixing is transparent to users. It is a very user-friendly plugin; you just have to select the layers you want to convert and click on the convert button to get your CSS code. Along with that, you get SASS, SCSS, vendor prefixes, text layer, and other supportive features to get your work done.
8. Ink:
Ink is a Photoshop documenter plugin that helps you keep your PSD files well organized. It is a very useful plugin for designers and developers. It allows designers to create some great templates and mockups which are easy for developers to understand in their coding terms. It makes the creation of the spec of your layers more effortless and more manageable.
Ink is a plugin that tries to minimize the communication gap between the designing and developing teams. It is a must-have plugin for any website company and professionals. It simply gives designers an advantage to document the different layers so that it becomes easier to find and use them for the users.
9. RH Color Nudger:
It is an advanced color picker tool. When you are working on a project and want to perform more than one action while picking up the color, you may need this plugin. It offers convenience with advanced options to make your work time-saving. It provides you hovering color swatches in photoshop, and other times it just remains minimized until you click on it.
The top widget allows you to choose the hue and vibrance of the color and the bottom sliders allow you to toggle between hue, saturation, brightness, and RGB. With this, you can precisely select the colors for your project. So you can save your time in the manual selection of functions and operations related to color manipulation.
10. Luminar:
Luminar is a solid and advanced tool that can change your whole workflow. It is a plugin that is compatible with Lightroom, Photoshop, and Apple Photos. It is an AI-powered photo editing plugin for photographers who wants to save time in complex editing. Luminar has the capabilities to give you a more personalized and intuitive experience. You can break the creative barriers with photo editing thanks to this plugin.
Luminar offers you a number of edits and filters with blending and masking options as well. You get fast and perfect edits for your photos within a minute through this plugin. You might not have to deal with any other tool or plugin for image advancement if you use Luminar for your photos.
11. Nik Collection:
Nik Collection by DXO is a package of eight different strong plugins. If you are a professional who needs to use photoshop for most of his work and whose profession is highly reliable on this software, Nik Collection would be an excellent decision for you. It has eight plugins like Color Efex Pro for photo filters, Silver Efex Pro for monochrome filters, Perspective Efex for perspective correction, Viveza for color editing, Sharpener Pro for sharpness changes, Analog Efex Pro for vintage effects, HDR Effects Pro for HDR changes, and Dfine for noise manipulation. These all plugins can change the look of your images and your working flow as well.
12. GuideGuide:
Many designers prefer creating grids on their projects for more convenience and precision. And this GuideGuide plugin is for that purpose specifically. You can easily create grids without any hassle and manual work. You get pixel-accurate columns, rows, midpoint, and baselines with this plugin and save your custom grids as well for future use. It also allows you to adjust the guides and margins.
GuideGuide is a great paid plugin for people who like to get flexible grids to feature on their daily work to maintain accurate details. It is well compatible with Photoshop, Illustrator, Sketch, Adobe XD for quick grids and consistent UI designs.
13. PortraitPro:
PortraitPro is one of the leading portrait editing plugins. It is loved by all the users, and if you want to have a unique and solid portrait enhancing plugin, then it is a must-try one. Camera pictures can be less satisfying at times, and photoshop has features to fix that. But if you want to have a simple yet effective way to do that, then you can definitely use this plugin. It is a user-friendly tool with sharp and effective features to remove spots, blemishes, marks, and other disturbances.
It allows you to use advanced filters and layer functionalities to place your portraits on different backgrounds. You can also edit makeup, skin, shape, hair color, and all the beautifications. The best part is the results; you get more accurate, smooth, and natural results with this plugin.
14. Seamless Texture:
In designs and various creative concepts, you need patterns and textures constantly because you know that a good texture can do so much to your project. Generally, people find online and get from some marketplaces. But with the Seamless Texture plugin, you can create your own textures within photoshop. You can use any of your images and convert them into a seamless and continuous pattern with this tool’s help.
It is a simple and straightforward plugin that can save you from all the searching and spending for your required textures. You don’t have to struggle with your specific requirement because this plugin can give you your preferred texture from an image within few steps.
With any software, you get software updates on a timely basis. So every time you get a software update for your adobe photoshop you can expect some excellent features and upgradation which wasn’t there before. But adobe has its own limitation. They can not provide every type of feature in one software and at a specific price range. So for such limitations, you have to opt for plugins. There are many free and paid plugins that are designed for a specific function, and we have included both kinds of plugins here for photography, designing, and general need.
You can choose as per your requirement and install it to use in photoshop directly. These plugins can help you to make your work more upgraded, organized, and time-saving within few steps. So, expand your creativity and performance canvas and win the intended results with photoshop with the help of plugins.