Photo Plug-ins | Taiwan Travel Photographers

Three Sisters, Katoomba, Australia

Photoshop, Lightroom and Aperture all allow you to make use of special types of software known as plug ins. These are third-party applications that give you additional options in your post-process. Some plugins work on import/ingestion, some in the middle of the workflow and some on export.

I use a number of different plugins with Lightroom and Photoshop. Here are a few of my most used ones.

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Nik Multimedia

The Nik Multimedia complete collection is a bundle consisting of Dfine 2.0 (noise reduction), Sharpener Pro 3.0 (sharpening), Color Efex Pro 3.0 (image enhancement filters), Silver Efex Pro (black and white) and Viveza 2 (selective lighting). I have them as Lightroom plugins which allows me to open an image in any of these applications, make adjustments and then save it back into Lightroom where I can continue to work on the image.

Imagenomic

Imagenomic are the makers of a great portrait retouching plugin called Portraiture 2. I use this as a Lightroom plugin quite frequently when working on portraits from studio sessions. It has a number of options for skin smoothing that I really like, although it’s very easy to go over the top with the effect. I used to also use their Noiseware plugin for noise removal, but a combination of the excellent high-ISO capabilities of my Canon 5D Mark II and the control offered by Nik Dfine means I don’t use this as much these days.

LR2/Mogrify

LR2/Mogrify is a great plug in that I use on export from Lightroom. I only scratch the surface with it and use it for watermarking, but it offers a lot more features such as borders, resizing and text annotations.

LR2Twitpic

This is a great little plugin built by Sean McCormack of Lightroom blog. It allows you to export a photo from Lightroom directly to Twitpic and automatically share it via Twitter. I use this a lot to give previews of edits or to show outtakes from various shoots.

So that covers my most used plug-ins. I also have a number of other ones that don’t get much use. I’ll look at them, and why they don’t get much use in a later post. What about you? Do you have any favorite plugins? Share them in the comments below.

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http://www.darrenmelrose.com/blog Darren Melrose

There are lots of plug ins, I have tried most that you mention and I think the trials of almost all the major plug ins that are out there. I tend to use a few very often myself. First, I really like Topaz Adjust. I always use it as a layer in PS and almost always lower the opacity, as the default settings tend to be over the top. However, when you tone them down, I find the effects are really effective. Alienskin exposure is also still my choice for b&w conversion. Nik's Silver Efex seems to be the one most use, but I find that I still often prefer the results I get from Exposure. I have been a NeatImage user for years when it comes to noise reduction; I don't know that it is any better than the others, but it is what I am used to and like. Lots to think about and try, I am sure.
http://www.craigfergusonimages.com cfimages

I've looked at a couple of Alienskin ones, but I don't think I've tried Exposure. Topaz Adjust is something I tried very early on but it didn't really fit my workflow (at the time) so I didn't buy a license for it. There are so many useful plug-ins available that it could get expensive to use them all!