Lightroom Plugins

Borders and watermark added using Mogrify

There are some very useful plugins available for Lightroom, and I’ve tried a good share of them. Here are some of the ones I’ve been using regularly and recommend:

• Photographer’s ToolBox: this suite of 3 plugins (Mogrify, Enfuse, Transporter) offer some great extra capabilities that I find I use quite often, including options for adding borders and text annotations to images on export, blending different exposures together for greater dynamic range, and the ability to work with metadata in more advanced ways. These plugins are donationware, meaning you can try them for free, but are asked to “donate” some amount to unlock their full capabilities.
• OnOne Software: offers free PhotoPresets that give you a large and useful variety of presets for the Develop module. I mostly use these as starting points to get ideas about how I might develop an image, including whether it would work in black and white.
• Photomatix Pro: for anyone working with HDR Photography (which I will be giving a workshop for this year), Photomatix Pro software is the standard, and it includes a plugin which allows you to work with images from within Lightroom. This is a huge convenience and time saver, and also helps keep your images better organized, which can often get out of control in HDR and all of the multiple exposures.
• SlideshowPro: a really great plugin for creating beautiful Flash slideshows within Lightroom that can then be exported for the web. I use this plugin to run the Student Gallery on the main website, and it is one of my favorites for sharing your images.

There are many others, and as I find them useful in my work, I’ll add them to this list in an updated posting. If you use any I haven’t mentioned, please let me know. Thanks for reading!

UPDATE– Here’s a new article with updates to this list.