Any recommendations for useful PShsop plugins?

[gregbradley]

There seems to be a million Photoshop plugins available on the net.

Are there any recommendations?

Sometimes they are very useful but the bulk of them aren't so good.

Greg.

[Yoddha]

I'm very happy with Noel Carbony's pack. Most of the actions are very usefully to see what you have gathered. For fine processing I use few of them, but still am satisfied.

[gregbradley]

Yes they are great value.

Greg.

[troypiggo]

Being a bit pedantic, Carboni's tools are actions not plugins.

What are you wanting to achieve? I think most of the common plugins are for noise removal, sharpening, and portrait skin touchup. Also some special effect ones.

There's heaps of noise removal plugins. I did a big study some time ago to see which one to purchase. Ended up going with Imagenomic Noiseware http://www.imagenomic.com/ which is quite popular, Noise Ninja is another one. To be honest I don't use it much any more. I've found that proper exposure and minimal cropping are the best methods of preventing noise. If the image is that noisy, it's probably not worth trying to salvage with the above software. Of course if there were sentimental reasons attached, might be different.

I also trialled Imagenomic Portraiture. It's by far and away the most recommended skin touchup plugin recommended on POTN. It is very good, but haven't been doing enough portraits to warrant it.

I don't have them, but I know several of the guys here highly recommend the Topaz plugins: http://www.topazlabs.com/

A fun plugin is the fractilius plugin by Redfield http://www.redfieldplugins.com/ Gets some cool effects.

Depends what you want. That help?

[gregbradley]

Thanks Troy. That is helpful.

Greg.