Plugins Overview

Plugins Overview

Adobe plugins are 3rd party extensions, in effect brand new commands, that run in Adobe Photoshop and many other popular graphic editors like Corel PhotoPaint, PaintShop Pro and Paiter or Ulead's PHoto Impact, etc. Many plugins are sophisticated enough to work well within the program they are running in. This means for example, they can restrict their actions or effects to a specific layer and even the masked area on that layer when called upon by the user. Other plugins by their very nature effect the total canvas and all its layers.

There are two new categories of plugins to be added to the classic design and process types. A design plugin is like Flaming Pear's Swerve or Xaos Paint Alchemy. Design plugins change the look and feel of the design of the image often by imitating natural media effects like Paint Alchemy's OilPaint or Color Sketch styles. Process plugins take a process like color correction as in the case of Nik's Color Efex and make it either easier to do or more effective in correcting common situations like underexposed shots or slightly out of focus images.

Two new categories are Adobe automation and advanced graphics plugins. Automation plugins only work in Photoshop and Photoshop Elements and appear as added commands in Photoshop's File | Automate menu. These plugins are primarily process plugins that take advantage of Automate's ability to pass multiple files to the plugin for batch processing. An example is Alien Skin's BlowUp plugin that allows bitmap images to be safely enlarged by 400% with minimized distortions, jaggies, and other artifacts. Finally, the advanced category sees 2D graphic plugins being applied in 3D, animation, and video programs. But the field is so specialized that these plugins now tend to work exclusively in their graphic program's specialty like video image enhancement or 2D image mapping to 3d surfaces, etc. However, the best way to describe plugins is to illustrate some of them in use. Here are some plugins by category.
The first group of plugins are typified by Extensis/onOne Intellihance (hover over the thumnail at left to see full screen shot). These are Process plugins that go beyond the typical Photoshop commands to enhance its capabilities - in this case some advanced and very quick color adjustments. Extensis/onOne Mask Pro was an essential add-on to Photoshop until version 5 for doing precise masking. Visual Infinity's Grain Surgery helps to remove noise in smart ways which just about all of the graphics editors could use. Like wise AlienSkin's Image Doctor does the same for major scratch repairs. Eventually many of the graphic editors catchup but for now Grain Surgery is a smart buy.
The next set of design plugins might be called Inspired Distortions. Photoshop's Liquify command is typical, Flaming Pear has a number including Swerve shown at the left, and Twist. These plugins distort selected portions or the full image in clever ways. Swerve adds a comic flair to its distortions, while Human Software's Squizz allows user to control and enfold a mesh grid in perverse ways. Some plugins even supply perspective and envelope constraints to give a 3D feel to their image machinations.
Texturizers are design plugins that add to part or the whole image a new texture, finish, or styling like Flaming Pear's Blade Pro seen at the left. Super Blade Pro almost has too many options. Other examples are Alien Skins XenoFex 2 or Kai's Power Tool whole KPT line of plugins like the devious Convoluter or Frax. What these Texturizers do best is give images a 3D relief, like an impasto paint brush, mosaic tiling or the rivules seen in the example.
The Painterly design plugins are like Microsoft's Image Composer, Fo2Pix Buzz, Jasc's Virtual Painter, and Xaos Tools Paint Alchemy (seen at left) - these are very clever 2D paint rendering engines. They analyze an image for color and edges/lines and then apply user customized painterly strokes to the areas - constrained by the color and edge forms found on the scene. These plugins have at least a dozen or more paint styles, many user-selected settings and the uncanny ability to make a soft or out-focus image suddenly have intriquing style and visually compelling possibilities.
The last group might be called the Seamless Tilers because these plugins like Xaos Tool's Terrazzo add backround tiling to an image or can be used to create astandalone, seamless tile. The Plugin Site Galaxy Effects has a clever tiler tool. And with more Web sites going to the Blog or Portal look - window panes of different styling, subtle repeating watermarks (highly transparent, pastel tiles) are coming back into design vogue. But an image enhaced with seamless tiles can be very innovative on its own.

Of course these five categories hardly encompass the full range of plugins that are available. Today there can be found both free and commercial plugins for Photoshop (and by extension many of the other major graphic editors like Corel PaintShop Pro or Macromedia Fireworks). Together these number in the hundreds and their popularity has lead to plagarism - as previously noted, Video and animation vendors have started to amass their own collections of plugins as well.

But being a plugin vendor is a hazrdous business. At any point in time, Adobe or one of the other graphics software vendors could decide to match and/or extend your plugins functionality This is what happened in the case of Photoshop's Liquify command. And in fact the whole collection of exposure that allow more sophisticated control of brightness and color - these process type plugins are already seeing their techniques being absorbed into Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro and other graphic editors. In sum look to the popular plugins to give you a strong hint where 2D graphics editing is likely to go in the next 1-3 years.



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