Top 10 Photographic Plugins

• Alienskin Exposure 2.01 - my personal favorite (and award-winning) Photoshop plug-in that gives digital photographs the look and feel of film. Whether you’re a fashion or wedding photographer, a designer or art director, with Exposure 2 you’ll have one-click access to the broadest range of film stocks and special effects settings available in any software package. That’s why Exposure 2 is the closest thing to film since film. It has over 300 presets, including push and cross processing, a vastly improved infrared simulator, and sophisticated color to black and white conversion.
• OnOne Software Genuine Fractals 6.0 - this plugin is loaded with resizing features that give you professional results every time. In addition to being able to enlarge images in high-quality, you can also crop and resize images in a single step, resize an entire folder of images with complete control of sizes, resolution, and file formats, and use the new Tiling and Gallery Wrap features to produce stunning prints. Genuine Fractals 6 Professional Edition is renowned across the photographic and printing industries for its ability to increase image size over 1,000% without the loss of sharpness or detail that you would normally expect. Its patented, fractal based interpolation algorithms work like nothing else and the results speak for themselves.
• Nik Color Efex 3.0 - a plugin that allows you to control color, light and tonality in your images and create unique enhancements with professional results. With 52 filters and over 250 effects found in Color Efex Pro 3.0 you can perform high quality retouching, color correction and endless creative enhancements to your photographs. Nik’s patented U Point technology provides the ultimate control to selectively apply enhancements without the need for any complicated masks, layers or selections. This plugin simulates cross processing so good, it’s more than enough to simulate lomography.
• Alienskin Bokeh 1.0 - this plugin accurately simulates the distinctive blurring and creamy highlights of real lenses. Terence Tay, Bokeh’s designer, performed careful experiments with lenses famous for their bokeh highlights, such as the Canon EF 85mm f/1.2 II and the Micro-Nikkor 105mm f/2.8. The result is a photo-realistic look, in contrast to the unnatural blur from other software. Bokeh can draw attention to your subject by manipulating focus and depth of field after the shot has been taken. From changing the depth of field to placing a radial sweet spot and adding a vignette, Bokeh provides many techniques for realistic blurring and altering the mood of a scene.
• Picture Code Noise Ninja 2.32 - the industry standard plugin for digital noise removal for photos. Noise Ninja is the most effective and productive solution for removing noise and grain from digital photographs and scanned film images. It is a must-have tool for anyone shooting in low-light or fast-action situations — including news, sports, wedding, and event coverage — where high ISO photography is required and the resulting noise compromises the image. Noise Ninja often yields a two-stop improvement in effective image quality, while preserving important image detail. In addition, it can produce cleaner, smoother enlargements from low-ISO images. Although be careful when using it, it might render some portraits looking ceramic and plasticky.
• Lucis Art 3.0 Enhanced Edition - Lito Sy’s favorite plugin which is now used by most local wedding photographers (in an attempt to duplicate Lito’s success). With LucisArt you will quickly and easily explore the creative potential of your image using various special artistic effects to make your images pop. Lucis Art 3 ED provides greatly increased ability to fine-tune how you enhance detail.
• Nik Software Viveza - a fantastic plugin that makes you the master of the art of selectively correcting or enhancing each of these is now possible for every photographer without the need for complicated masks or selections, or expert-level knowledge of Photoshop. Integrating award-winning U Point technology, Viveza is the most powerful and precise tool available to control light and color in photographic images.
• Tiffen DFX 2.0 - a photographic filter plugin that features multiple masking and layering capabilities with Photoshop and a host of other features including more than 2000 standard, exclusive and special effect filters.
• On One Software Photo Tools 2.0 - one of the the fastest ways to add a professional look to your photos in Photoshop via hundreds of professional-grade photographic effects designed by Jack Davis, Kevin Kubota and onOne Software, all wrapped up in an easy-to-use Photoshop plug-in. This the fastest and easiest way to make your photos stand out from the crowd. With PhotoTools 2, you can preview, stack and combine effects to produce professional grade results in just a few clicks. PhotoTools 2 reproduces camera filters like neutral density, color correction and polarization as well as film and darkroom techniques such as paper toners and alternative processes.
• Imagenomic Portraiture - this is a plugin that eliminates the tedious manual labor of selective masking and pixel-by- pixel treatments to help you achieve excellence in portrait retouching. It intelligently smoothens and removes imperfections while preserving skin texture and other important portrait details such as hair, eyebrows, eyelashes etc. Portraiture comes with pre-defined presets for one-click effects and, as with all Imagenomic plug-ins, you can capture your own signature workflow in a custom preset tailored to your specific requirements and photographic portfolio.

So that’s more or less what filters I personally recommend for photography. I choose not to include photo-stitching filters/software as it’s quite a niche genre of photography.