Have you tried plug-ins?

[tegan]

How many of you have used plug-ins to Photoshop or other photo-editors?
How many use plug-ins more often than the program?

Tegan

[Travis]

when i used Gimp i used plugins.... everything seems to be a plug in with gimp...

i find plug ins can be cranky if the third party isn't well resourced...

[tegan]

I find that although the Nik plug-ins are rather pricey, they are very flexible and reliable.

Tegan

[Travis]

I find that although the Nik plug-ins are rather pricey, they are very flexible and reliable.

Tegan

What are these? (NiK) are they Nikon sponsered softwares?

My 30day element trial expired... i've rarely used it aside from the first few days... so i didn't buy it...

Now I'm trying Capture NX and shooting RAW.... do NIK plugins work with Capture NX?

[Alex Wilson]

I've got some scripts, such as Dr. Brown's Process 1-2-3 that are invaluable to my workflow.

For making some poster-sized prints, I used a plugin to scale it up, and got better results than with the 10% method.

I used to a noise reduction plugin, but I haven't used it years. Back when I first started shooting digitally, I would religiously run the noise reduction filter on every image before starting to edit it -- and it took about 8 minutes for each file to run on my poor old computer.

For me, the "special effect" plugins have the same danger as some of the cheesy effect filters -- you might like the end result, but you risk the image looking like you ran a random filter without much thought being put into it. Just because you *can* pointilize an image, doesn't mean you *should*. The real power of those filters (and plugins) is using them the help build up subtle image effects.

But there's a lot of useful utility plugins (lens correction, resizing, etc.) that provide key missing (or at least enhanced) functionality from PhotoShop.

[tegan]

What are these? (NiK) are they Nikon sponsered softwares?

My 30day element trial expired... i've rarely used it aside from the first few days... so i didn't buy it...

Now I'm trying Capture NX and shooting RAW.... do NIK plugins work with Capture NX?

I don't think Nik is at all related to Nikon. Check out www.niksoftware.com.
Viveza and Colour FX are both quite good and useful to speed up postprocessing.

Tegan

[tegan]

I've got some scripts, such as Dr. Brown's Process 1-2-3 that are invaluable to my workflow.

For me, the "special effect" plugins have the same danger as some of the cheesy effect filters -- you might like the end result, but you risk the image looking like you ran a random filter without much thought being put into it. Just because you *can* pointilize an image, doesn't mean you *should*. The real power of those filters (and plugins) is using them the help build up subtle image effects.

But there's a lot of useful utility plugins (lens correction, resizing, etc.) that provide key missing (or at least enhanced) functionality from PhotoShop.

Sure, some of the free and shareware plug-ins in the special effect area are somewhat silly. I do however find software filters extremely useful, since you can apply them with various controls to a select part of your image, which is not possible with the hard camera filter.

Conversely, a hard polarizer can do things that are not possible with a software polarizer, but a software polarizer can still improve the sky.

Tegan

[scalespeeder]

I've started to run Noise Ninja with almost every photo I edit(having set up custom profiles for my camera).

The only special effects plug-in I've used a lot is melancholytron by flaming pear, it adds a darkening / sepia / blur vignette than can be interesting some times.

[tegan]

I've started to run Noise Ninja with almost every photo I edit(having set up custom profiles for my camera).

The only special effects plug-in I've used a lot is melancholytron by flaming pear, it adds a darkening / sepia / blur vignette than can be interesting some times.

Interesting shot. Take a look at the software filters from Nik Software or Tiffen. You are likely to get more use out of them, than the special effects filters.

Tegan

[reijo]

I have the viveza plug in from Nik software. I find it very useful and use it almost exclusively after universal adjustments in camera raw.
It is great because you can adjust separate parts of the photo. And if you convert to smart filter first you can go back and modify your adjustments later.