Looking for new ways to express your creativity with Paint Shop Pro? Try out some of these free plugins that can be downloaded, installed, and ready to use in minutes.
Paint Shop Pro Plugins
If you want to extend the photo editing capabilities of Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 even further, there are a considerable number of plugins available for download, both free and commercial. These plugins cover a breadth of functions including applying special effects to images, getting rid of excess noise, and automating repetitive editing sequences.
Here, we’ll take a look at some of the best Paint Shop Pro plugins that are completely free and require nothing from you except download and installation. If this is the first time you’ve added a plugin to Paint Shop Pro and you have questions about how to load the application for general use, see the article Installing Paint Shop Pro Third-Party Plugins.
(Click on any image to enlarge)
| AmphiSoft Photo Tinter | Rating  |
AmphiSoft Photo Tinter is a nice addition for those who spend a lot of time adjusting color tones in their digital photos. The feature that 
makes this plugin particularly useful is that it allows you to extract tone profiles from one image and apply them to another. Additionally, several profiles come bundled with the application, ready to be applied to existing photos.
The Photo Tinter plugin can also be used with Photoshop and several other image editors in the Windows environment.
| Topaz DeJPEG | Rating |
Topaz DeJPEG is an excellent free plugin utility that gets rid of JPEG artifacts in digital photographs. While it’s not as robust as DeNoise, the more general noise reduction application developed by Topaz Labs, it still does a great job of getting rid of ugly 
pixelated blocks that can show up in compressed JPEG images.
In addition to Paint Shop Pro, DeJPEG is compatible with a number of other photo editing applications including Photoshop and IrfanView. Despite being free, the plugin has a very professional-looking user interface and is quite user friendly.
When using the application to remove JPEG artifacts, a default preset configuration will be applied to the photo, but you can easily adjust these settings manually and see a preview of these changes before they are applied to your image. If you have questions about the function of any of the settings, simply hover your mouse pointer over the corresponding area, and a pop-up balloon explaining the setting will appear.
| Harry’s Filters 3 | Rating |
Most free plugins that provide special image effects aren’t very comprehensive and usually only focus on one or two specific functions. However, Harry’s Filters 3 contains almost 70 different effects and even includes the functionality to let you create your own new effects and save them as presets within the plugin interface.
Even though Harry’s Filters 3 is a fairly lightweight application, its power rivals that of many commercial plugins. It has a very intuitive user interface and includes a basic help file explaining the function of each available setting. However, the best way to see what each setting does is to play around with the sliders, and see how the preview image is affected by the modifications.
| 3D Shadow | Rating |
Although Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 has an excellent tool that can be used to create drop shadows for objects, it can take awhile to play around with the settings to find the exact look that you want to achieve. This process is made a lot easier with Lokas Software’s 3D Shadow plugin.
This plugin’s intuitive user interface includes a large preview window that is updated continuously as changes to the shadow effect are made. Several preset configurations come bundled with 3D Shadow, and you can even create and save your own customized settings for later use in other projects.
| Xero Graphics Free Plugins | Rating |
Another large collection of free image effects can be found at Xero Graphics. Although there are over 40 different filters available here, they are packaged in bundles so you can download and install several at a time.
Each plugin has a preview page on the site so you can get an idea of its function before trying it out for yourself. Some of my favorites from this collection are Mistifier, which produces a soft haze-like effect, and Emphasis, which allows you to emphasize particular colors in a photo.
Next: Continue on to page 2 for more high-quality free plugins compatible with Paint Shop Pro.