10 Useful Photoshop Plugins Designers Should Know

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When it comes to design work, there is one handy design tool that most professional designers cannot do without: Photoshop. Photoshop is a flexible, convenient, creative and powerful design tool. However, it still has many limitations when used for specific areas
But Photoshop plugins have been developed to let designers not only finish their work on time but also get extra features that make a project much better than it needs to be. Many such Photoshop plugins exist, but most of them are outdated and cannot be used with the latest versions of Photoshop.
If you are a designer and want to boost your creativity and speed on design projects, here are some of the best Photoshop plugins every designer must have:

1. Cut&Slice Me

Cut & Slice Me is a plugin that exports the Assets you need as PNG files, with all Transparent Pixels trimmed off. All you need to do is add @ to the end of the Layer name, and the plugin takes care of the rest. Cut & Slice Me also organizes and groups layers as objects. When you want to export a file at a fixed size, you can create a vector rectangle as the first layer and then give it a name starting with.
2. Subtle Patterns
Subtle Patterns is a free library of high-quality patterns by Atle Mo. The Subtle Patterns plugin integrates them straight into your Photoshop panel. Just click a pattern thumbnail and the texture is applied right away as a layer style to your current layer – a time-saving tool worth $11.99.

3. Transform Each 2.0
The Transform Each command is a great feature of Illustrator but it does not appear in Photoshop. It lets you transform groups of layers individually. Transform Each is very useful because you can resize, rotate and reposition multiple elements at once without doing these operations for each element.
Transform Each also has an option to change the width and height as you like (Scale Styles and Constrain Proportions). However, always use the Preview button to check before you hit the OK button.

4. PNG Hat
This plugin is quite useful; it provides powerful features that let you export images faster in Photoshop. It has other features such as the ability to generate CSS (cascading style sheets), great image compression, HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and a unique feature called Objective-C. Objective-C lets you insert images into any design project you may be working on,

5. Fixel Contrastica 2 PS
This plugin lets users quickly enhance the global and local contrast of an image. It is a tool that works excellently without clipping pixels.

6. Render.Ly
Render.ly is a plugin that uses smart technology and exports complete design specs. The exported elements are the ones that have been changed. All you need to do is make sure you use the right prefix and leave the rest to Render.ly. To keep the vector format for your icons, just attach the ‘ico’ prefix. To export images, you need to add something like ‘img’ as the prefix, and it will be exported as a raster graphic. Render.Ly lets you manage assets, add variations to screens and automatically export all of them with a single click. Although this plugin is still in private beta, you can preview it by signing up, since it accepts new designers all the time.

7. GuideGuide
Guideguide helps create pixel-perfect columns, rows, midpoints and baselines based on the project you are working on or your selection. This plugin lets you save frequently used guide sets so they are handy when you need them, and you can also apply multiple measurements.
With Guideguide, you can precisely measure the width of each Navigation Element so it fits the width of a web page, as well as create baseline grids and gutters. You can try it for free or buy the Pro version for Photoshop CC (or later) for just $10.

8. Portraiture
This is one of the best tools that uses skin smoothing algorithms.

9. Font Awesome
This Photoshop plugin is known for providing impressive icons right in an easy-to-access Photoshop panel. It is at the top of the popular icon fonts on the market today.

10. CSS Hat 2
Another powerful Photoshop plugin is CSS Hat, which generates CSS code. Although Photoshop comes with a built-in feature that does the same job, CSS Hat 2 is designed to offer more capabilities and flexibility.