Get your (free) Photoshop plug-ins!
One of the most commonly used and popular type of plugins are Photoshop plugins or more generally expressed Photoshop-compatible plugins. Since they were introduced by Adobe in the beginning 90’s with Photoshop 2.5, thousands of them were developed by a few hundred people and companies all over the world. More than 50 image and video applications presently support Photoshop plugins to a more or less large extent.
Photoshop-compatible plugins are aimed at supplying additional image effects or performing special tasks that are impossible or difficult to achieve with the means of an image application alone. They integrate into the host application and are executed from within the application. There are several types of Photoshop-compatible plugins available, e.g. filter plugins, import and export plugins, file format plugins and automation plugins. Additionally there are also color picker plugins, selection plugins and parser plugins, but noone else than Adobe has ever created plugins of these types. The most common type are filter plugins which have the have the file extension .8bf and usually supply special image effects. Import/export usually let you acquire or write image data from or to certain devices, file format plugins let you open and save exotic image formats and automation plugins automate certain tasks in the manner of Photoshop Actions. [Link]