The Best Adobe Photoshop Plug-Ins for 2024

BrushBox adds drag-and-drop support to brushes and tool presets in Photoshop, bringing them together in one panel. It also lets you search, tag, and color-code presets. If famous brush designer Kyle T. Webster says that BrushBox is "the organizational plug-in digital artists have been hoping for," who are we to disagree? Brushbox costs a one-time price of $19 and is available on Gumroad; it's not in the Adobe Exchange marketplace.

DXO PureRAW delivers excellent noise reduction without as many sliders and complexities as other plug-ins. Click a button and it not only removes the noise but also extracts more detail from your RAW files. Additionally, the software plug-in includes bespoke lens-distortion corrections for many different lenses and offers a streamlined workflow for both Photoshop and Lightroom. The company also makes an Editors' Choice-winning workflow application, DxO PhotoLab, which can also be installed as a standalone app or as a Photoshop or Lightroom plug-in.

The Fontself plug-in for Photoshop and Illustrator is a game-changer for designers and typographers alike. With Fontself, creating custom fonts has never been easier or more accessible. Its intuitive and user-friendly interface lets you easily convert your hand-drawn lettering, vector graphics, or any other artwork into fully functional fonts with just a few clicks. The plug-in supports both bitmap and vector formats, ensuring versatility in font creation. Additionally, Fontself offers a range of advanced features, such as ligature support, kerning adjustments, and character set customization. All together, it gives designers complete control over their font designs. This plug-in is powerful enough for pros yet simple enough that beginners can use it, too.

Adobe has its own AI image generation tool, called Firefly, but if you want more options, the ImageCreator plug-in is your best bet. It adds a panel to Photoshop where you describe what you want in an image and how it should be styled, and the tool makes it happen. You first need to select an area in your image. Then you choose from among several AI models, including Stable Diffusion, LoRA, ControlNet, and Generative Fill. Some of these options have an anime look and feel.

The plug-in creates four results in square thumbnails. Selecting one of them creates a layer in your image with the generated matter. A history panel stores your previous efforts, and the Explore panel lets you search others' prompts for creations. One cool thing about this plug-in is that, if you don't like the generated images you first get, you can try another AI model, and you can enter negative text in a separate prompt box to exclude characteristics from the result. Adobe's Firefly gives you neither of these options.

PixelSquid by Shutterstock is a helpful resource for graphic designers and digital photo illustrators when they need to add 3D objects to a canvas. The Photoshop plug-in gives subscribers access to more than 244,000 3D objects, many of which are nearly photorealistic. Using this ample set, digital collage makers can easily add all manner of items: flora, fauna, vehicles, and more. At $199 per year (or $19.99 per month) to subscribe, the plug-in is on the pricier side, but you get a lot of objects to choose from for the price.

PixelSquid by Shutterstock is a helpful resource for graphic designers and digital photo illustrators when they need to add 3D objects to a canvas. The Photoshop plug-in gives subscribers access to more than 244,000 3D objects, many of which are nearly photorealistic. Using this ample set, digital collage makers can easily add all manner of items: flora, fauna, vehicles, and more. At $199 per year (or $19.99 per month) to subscribe, the plug-in is on the pricier side, but you get a lot of objects to choose from for the price.

The Photoshop plug-in marketplace has several QR code generators, but most of them simply create a new image containing the code. However, Evenx's QR Code Generator can slap the code right into your image or in a new layer it creates. It also lets you add variables such as counters or EXIF entries. A free trial version includes an Evenx watermark, which the paid version removes. Unlike most other plug-ins included here, this one is added to the bottom of the Filters menu, rather than to the Plug-ins or Extensions menus.

The Radiant Photo plug-in offers image enhancement, film looks, and auto-tone that goes beyond what's built into Photoshop. It not only provides exclusive image enhancement features like non-destructive dynamic range manipulation, but also supports Photoshop actions, ensuring efficient and rapid output for a large number of photos requiring similar edits. Furthermore, Radiant Photo offers the convenience of Smart Presets, which let you apply premade presets or create custom ones.

Retouch Ninja from Pro Add-Ons is a set of four plug-ins that excel at frequency separation, creating separate layers for colors and textures to help you fix blemishes while retaining texture. The plug-in also features raw presets, dynamic masks, multiple dodge and burn options, and color correction. Another member of the group of plug-ins included, Katanas, lets you combine existing Photoshop tools with Retouch Ninja tools. Considering everything it includes, the $39.90 price is quite reasonable.

If you're looking for an excellent noise reduction plug-in offering a bit more control than the competition, Topaz DeNoise AI might be your best choice. By allowing more hands-on Photoshop users to make local noise-reducing adjustments using brush masks selectively, you have more control over where Topaz applies its impressive AI-driven noise-reduction capabilities. It's no wonder it also remains PCMag's Editors' Choice winner for image noise reduction.

If you're interested in expanding your use of AI beyond basic noise reduction and sharpening, get Skylum Luminar's photo editing plug-in. It's more of a full photo editing application that runs as a Photoshop plug-in. The software offers a wide array of AI-powered features, such as its unique depth-based relighting and a tool specifically for removing power lines from pictures. You also get sky replacement, a rich collection of filters, layer support, and a library of textures and overlays. Whether you're an aspiring photographer or a seasoned pro, Skylum Luminar can be a valuable asset for getting the best out of your images. The software costs a hefty $199 for a permanent license, but a subscription is $7.46 per month with a year commitment, and there's a 30-day money-back guarantee if you find it's not for you.

If you're looking for an excellent noise reduction plug-in offering a bit more control than the competition, Topaz DeNoise AI might be your best choice. If you're a more hands-on Photoshop user, you can use brushes to make masks selectively to control where Topaz applies its impressive AI noise-reduction. It's no wonder it also remains a PCMag Editors' Choice winner for image noise reduction.

Watermark 3 is a Photoshop script that automatically places a text or image watermark on a photo, or even more importantly, on a batch of photos. The free version does that, but the paid Pro version adds preset choices, image sharpening, and resizing. Professional wedding and event photographers may find the ability to apply watermarks to a whole folder of shots all at once particularly appealing.