Graphic.com Has a nice article explaining three ways that you can use to reduce the noise from digital images. Anyone that has ever been involved with stock photography knows how hard this is. The main reason is that if you overdo it you introduce artifacts in the image which are even worse than noise imho.
The three ways that Graphic.com describes work (I usually use the first one) but I thought that I should mention a photoshop plugin that does exactly that reduce the digital noise. There ae several plugins of course but this one is free. It’s the DeNoise plugin.

Another free option is a standalone application, the Noiseware Community Edition (scroll to the bottom of the page). Although it has the disadvantage that it is a stand alone application it is really easy to use and provides quite good results.

Beautifier is a free Photoshop plugin that was released by Red Paw Media. Red Paw media is the creator of two more free plugins the Hot Pixel and the BleachBypass. What this filter does, is that it creates a High Key effect that you often see used in fashion magazines.
The user can play with four different settings

• Diffusion
• Brightness
• Strength
• Saturation

and there is also an option to simulate an Infrared black and white effect.

The filter worked quite nicely and there are also a couple of nice examples at the plugins homepage where you can check it in action.
The main drawback for some people is that it is a windows only plugin.

Developer descriptions:

DuoTone: create precise tones composing of two color choices. Use brushes to paint away parts you don’t want on your image.

MonoTone: a wonderful way to make a monochromatic print out of a single color.

Black and White: Our technology automatically uses a green and yellow filtering system, which cuts down the transmission of blue light, making skies appear darker and clouds stand out more. Orange and red filters are used to lighten tones and darken those of other colors, which produce dramatically darkened skies.

Contrasting Levels: Caputres details lost in the shadows. It also reduces the brightness range of an excessively contrast image, by subduing bright areas of sky, water, snow, and sand which bring the light back to a normal range.

Grain: will give your image the look of exposed and processed silver halides left behind on film emulsion. Use this effect to give your image the unique grain shapes that align better than conventional ones

Warm Cool: Use this on color images to give either a cooling or a warming effect. Cooling filters are pale blue and will warm a pale straw color. Warming will prevent a cold feel to pictures taken on overcast days or in shady areas on sunny days.

StarLight: add flare to your art. This feature will render brilliant points of light from your image highlights.

I haven’t played with the filter enough but so far it looks like a really nice filter and you can’t beat the price (I will post examples later on). You can downlod it and view some examples of the effects PixelSampler can create at the Website of Twisting Pixels.

Technorati Tags: Photoshop, Plugin, effects, Twisting Pixels, PixelSampler

Tachyon (a plugin I use quite a lot for image retouching, I will make a tutorial soon about how I use it)
ChromaSolarize
AnaglyphFlip
PixelTrash
Demitone 25 and 50
Swap Red and Blue and Swap Red and Green and Swap Green and Blue
Grey from Red and Grey from Blue and Grey from Green
Sphere warp A and B
RGB to HSL and HSL to RGB
RGB to LAB and LAB to RGB
Vitriol
Kyoto Color
Veins
Zephyr
Ornament
and a few more

You can download the plugins from Flaming Pear’s download page (you have to scroll down towards the end of the page)

AlphaWorks : 6 filters with various transparency properties
ColourWorks : 20 filters for modifying the colours in your images
EdgeWorks : 20 filters for producing edge/contour effects
ScreenWorks : 30 filters with different screen/mesh overlays
EmbossWorks : 20 filters containing simple emboss variations
SwapShop : 15 filters that “swap” colour values in your images
MasterBlaster : 20 filters to “blast” colours giving a strong cast
Mezzy : 15 filters for producing mezzo and grain effects

These plugins were created sometime ago but they are still useful. The one I use the most out of these is the Alphaworks.

The second series is called “Fotomatic Plugins”. This series includes 8 plugins that offer effects based on traditional photography techniques. The Fotomatic plugins includes the following plugins.

Hi-Force
G-Spot
Techni-X
Nightscope
Skygrad
Pseudo-IR
FastFix
BWplus

You can check them out at Cybia’s site

Technorati Tags: photoshop, plugins, filters, effects, free, cybia

Halftone Filter
Tiler
and Superformula

You can see all of his plugins at his site (Note the free ones are at the bottom of the page)

Technorati Tags: Richard Rosenman, free, photoshop, plugins

You can find this great photoshop plugin here

Technorati Tags: photoshop, plugin, sinedots

Sample pictures

Virtual Photographer Homepage

Technorati Tags: Photoshop, plugins, free, adobe, optikverve labs, virtual, photographer

B/W Conversion

Developper’s description: Yet another B/W conversion plugin? Yes, but one with powerfull features that allow full control over the final result:

* Total control over the tonal response of Red, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue and Magenta, and the intermediate hues. The user can boost each color’s tonal response all the way up to white or limit it down to black, without affecting the other colors at all .
* The plugin offers presets that accurately simulate the tonal response of the most popular b/w films.
* The plugin can introduce a grain effect of controllable intensity and density.
* An option to simulate the effect of color lens filters, with selectable hue and saturation is also available.
* The user can also aplly a toning effect of selectable color and intensity.
* A brightness meter is displayed when the cursor is over the preview window
* All settings can be saved in a parameter file to be available for future use.

Selective Saturation
Developper’s description: Quite often some parts of a photo require a saturation adjustment while others do not. If we increase the saturation globally, the most saturated parts get oversaturated and if we decrease it, the less saturated parts get undersaturated.
We need a Saturation Mask based on the individual pixel saturation in order to adjust it just where it is needed. Unfortunately even Photoshop does not provide a fast and straightforward way to create a saturation mask, like it does for brightness masks.
So this plugn, Selective Saturation, lets the user define a Saturation Zone by setting it’s center and range with two sliders.
A mask preview mode is available to fine tune the settings.
Then every saturation adjustment affects only those parts of the photo with saturation value that lies in the specified saturation zone.

Local Contrast Enhancement:
Developper’s description: This plugin’s main purpose is to bring out detail.
This is accomplished by increasing the contrast between a pixel’s value and the mean value of the adjacent pixels in a local area of the photo.
You can control the amount of the increase of contrast, the size of the local area and the amount of blending with the original photo.

High Pass Sharpening
Developper’s description: This is a plugin to sharpen photos with the classic high pass method. The user can adjust the high pass filter radius, and control the blending with the original image. A high pass output preview is also available to help the user adjust the filter radius up to the point the edges to be sharpened show up.
High pass sharpening is generally considered to produce less halos and other sharpening artifacts than USM.

Soft Focus
Developper’s description: This plugins applies a soft focus effect, which is often usefull in portraits or fashion photography. There are controls to adjust the focus softness, the overall strength of the effect and the blending mode of the overlayed blured image.

Lens Correction
Developper’s description: This plugin corrects barrel and pincushion distortions that many zoom camera lenses.produce.
Just move the sliders to the left to correct barrel distortion, and to the right to correct pincushion .

Contrast Mask
Developper’s description: This plugin uses a contrast mask to reduce the overall contrast of the image, simultaneously bringing out more detail in both highlights and shadows.
A b/w negative of the image is blured (with a radius controlled by the “Smoothing” slider) to avoid hard edges and then overlayed with the original, darkening the highlights and lightening the shadows.

Gradient Blur
Developper’s description: This plugin apllies a gradient blur that can help us draw the viewes attention to the photograph’s main subject.

Technorati Tags: free, photoshop, adobe, plugins, photo-plugins, filters, gradient blur, b/w conversion, selective saturation, lens correction, high pass sharpening, contrast mask, soft focus, Local contrast enhancement

Water Ripples (My favorite from Redfield’s plugins)

Lattice Composer

Craquelure 3D

Jama 3D

Seamless Workshop

Technorati Tags: adobe, photoshop, plugins, free, redfield, water ripples, craquelure