The Best Free Photoshop Plugins of 2025

What are Photoshop Plugins?

Adobe Photoshop is arguably the undisputed champion when it comes to image editing software. There is no app more powerful, flexible and recognizable than Photoshop, and with the reputation of over three decades of production-proven experience.

Although Photoshop can cover just about any area of digital image editing, its true power shines in its plugin ecosystem – one that has flourished throughout the years due to avid third-party plugin development. These plugins allow for the expansion of Photoshop’s capabilities in various aspects including image manipulation, workflow automation, advanced selections, color correction, object manipulation, extensions, and more.

While there’s an ample supply of commercially available Photoshop plugins, there’s a smaller but noteworthy collection of free plugins as well. Many of these provide unique effects not previously possible, while others enhance workflow. Some even provide results so impressive they should be categorized as commercial!

In this article, we’ll explore some of the best free Photoshop plugins available from Richard Rosenman Advertising & Design to help elevate your skills and take your work to the next level.

Richard Rosenman Advertising & Design

Richard Rosenman Advertising & Design develops cutting-edge Photoshop plugins for 3D artists, agencies, designers, photographers and animators. With over two decades in computer graphics software development, the powerful line of plugins has become part of the must-have arsenal for creatively-driven professionals and production studios throughout the world. Aside from the currently-existing eight powerful commercial plugins used by studios throughout the world, Richard Rosenman Advertising & Design also provides a collection of 35 completely free photoshop plugins. The free plugin collection has become synonymous with Photoshop and are widely used across most creative industries.

These free plugins expand Photoshop’s capabilities in numerous methods including distortion plugins, particle plugins, grid plugins, border plugins, fractal plugins, color channel plugins, and more.

Fractus Photoshop Plugin

If you’ve ever wanted the ultimate fractal Photoshop plugin, this is it. It’s capable of exploring the Mandelbrot and Julia set fractals along with their inverse counterparts and exponential powers. Fractus’ coloring algorithms generate beautiful fractal images with advanced smooth-shading techniques and full anti-aliasing support. The filter is 100% multi-threaded for multi-core workstations and offers 48 bit color capabilities. Fractus supports numerous unique features including fractal-space image mapping (orbit traps), image color palette generation, variable bailout function types and advanced procedural coloring algorithms. Finally, Fractus is capable of generating extremely high resolution fractals, in excess of 900 megapixels.

Fractus can be used for a wide variety of purposes but it is an especially useful tool for the creation of generative art for various creative industries including graphic design, motion graphics and illustration. Best of all, Fractus is 100% free.

Grid Generator Photoshop Plugin

One of the most widely required effects in design are grids yet Photoshop simply doesn’t have a capable toolset available for it. Enter Grid Generator – a powerful & versatile Photoshop plugin for generating all sorts of custom grids, quickly and efficiently.

Grid Generator provides full control for horizontal and vertical cell size, along with locks for universal scaling. More importantly, Grid Generator features aspect ratio controls allowing the user to develop square cells or ones that respect the image’s aspect ratio. Grid Generator offers control over line color, cell color, intensity and even image border. Make your grids painstakingly easy to generate using Grid Generator.

Particle Tracer Photoshop Plugin

Particle Tracer is a unique plugin for for Adobe Photoshop that traces particle trajectories. It’s quite useful for creating unique generative effects and, with a little post-processing, you can create wonders. Particle Tracer’s powerful features are easy to use. Particles can be easily set up by the tens, hundreds or thousands with a respective lifespan. Randomness can be added to the lifespans for truly natural results.

Box Fitting Photoshop Plugin

Box Fitting is a program originally developed by the genius mind of programmer / artist Jared Tarbell ported to Adobe Photoshop. The algorithm works by creating a single box and enlarging it until it either reaches the maximum size allowed or reaches the edge of another box. Ultimately, the canvas is filled with as many boxes as possible turning the image into a beautiful mosaic of randomly-sized squares. Box Fitting creates a unique effect not possible without the use of an automated plugin. Moreover, Box Fitting yields spectacular results when used in high resolution.

The plugin provides flexible control over how many boxes to create, the maximum size allowed and a random seed generator. It allows the user to sample color from the image or assign a custom color with a variation threshold, and also features a preview and render multiplier for high resolution imaging.

Halftone Photoshop Plugin

Ever wanted a full-feature halftone generator without the price? Halftone does this and more, completely free. Halftone simulates halftone imagery through the use of dots. It’s a filter that can be applied to images or can be used to generate masks with. The latest version of Halftone is a greatly improved and simplified version from the previous ones. It has had most previous features stripped out and only the most important ones have been kept. It has been re-coded from scratch with a completely different algorithm that now handles antialiasing without the use of super-sampling so it is dramatically faster.

Halftone converts an image to black and white, using the pixel intensity to define the dot size. halftone works on black and white images and also full color ones. You can choose between halftone printing where the pixel intensity defines dot size or dot matrix printing where all dots are equal size.

Solid Border Photoshop Plugin

Borders are often the foundation of design work so what better way to achieve this than with Solid Border, a free, powerful and versatile border plugin for Photoshop. It’s excellent for creating precision borders around images with proportionally-accurate values. Solid Border provides full horizontal and vertical width adjustment combined with adjustable color intensity. You can enable horizontal and vertical locks for uniform border widths.

Additionally, Solid Border allows you to force an aspect ratio of 1:1 or use the image’s own aspect ratio for horizontal and vertical border thickness. Units can be in percentage or pixels for precise HTML development.

Ascii Art Photoshop Plugin

ASCII art is a graphic design technique that uses computers for presentation and consists of pictures pieced together from the 95 printable (from a total of 128) characters defined by the ASCII Standard from 1963 and ASCII compliant character sets with proprietary extended characters (beyond the 128 characters of standard 7-bit ASCII). It’s made by arranging letters, numbers, and symbols to create pictures. Richard Rosenman Advertising & Design has developed a free Ascii Art generator that works as an effect right within Photoshop.

Ascii Art works by mapping heavier toned Ascii characters to darker areas and lighter toned Ascii characters to brighter areas. For instance, the character ‘#’ maps to a darker color while the character ‘.’ maps to a brighter color. Ascii Art captures exactly what is displayed in the preview window and outputs it directly to a text file. Using Ascii Art’s various features, the user can control appearance of the output including scale, height and header information is available. If the preview window is zoomed in or cropped, the captured image will reflect the zoom and cropping. Therefore, the preview window should be thought of as the camera viewfinder.

One of the most powerful features of Ascii Art is the ability to customize the mapping matrix. This allows the user to redefine the assigned characters thereby allowing the creation of an image using only numbers or special symbols, for instance.

Buddhabrot Photoshop Plugin

Buddhabrot is an extremely powerful fractal exploration plugin for Adobe Photoshop based on the unique Mandelbrot set rendering technique developed by Melinda Green. Instead of plotting pixels based on the number of iterations used, they are colored according to density counts – in other words, how many times a sample hits the same spot. In addition, if each color channel is iterated a different number of times, the rendered image appears to have a multi-colored, nebula-like effect much like modern NASA galaxy renders. The single color channel rendering technique has been termed the Buddhabrot by Lori Gardi due to its similarity to the Hindu God Ganesha, while the multi-channel rendering technique has been termed the Nebulabrot due to its similarity to colorful nebulas.

This Buddhabrot implementation is a sophisticated one capable of plotting various Buddhabrot / Nebulabrot versions of the Mandelbrot, Tricorn, Burning Ship and Diamond fractals along with their inverse counterparts, negative equivalents, and alternate 4D projection planes. Buddhabrot’s coloring algorithms generate vibrant fractal images using traditional Buddhabrot and Nebulabrot rendering techniques with complete control over red, green and blue multipliers and gamma.

You can create some incredible generative designs with this plugin and it’s unique in the sense that no other Photoshop effects function in the same way. Check it out and see what you can come up with.

Pixelate Photoshop Plugin

Who doesn’t love 8-bit art? Pixelate is a Photoshop plugin that pixelates an image with cell outline. Pixelate expands upon the standard Adobe Photoshop Mosaic filter by adding cell outline & width / height features. The user can choose a custom color and intensity for the cell outlines as well as adjust the horizontal and vertical cell sizes. Pixelate has an unlimited number of potential uses. From technical imaging effects to creative 8-bit styling, pixelate is an indispensable tool to the Photoshop arsenal.

Conclusion

This is a partial list and there’s many more free Photoshop plugins from Richard Rosenman Advertising & Design, all of which can help expand Photoshop’s capabilities and, in turn, propel your creative skills to the next level. In addition, new plugins are being developed every day, often featuring unique results never before possible. Take some time to explore the complete collection here.