14 Best Free and Professional Plugins for Adobe Lightroom
Last Updated on November 11, 2021 by Peter Wood
Though Lightroom is expensive, many photographers subscribe to it. One benefit of Adobe Lightroom is extendable with plugins. You can introduce new features or enhance existing features of Lightroom with plugins. If you search for some free and paid Lightroom plugins, this article is good news for you. Below you will find the best plugins to help you do photo editing and color correction within Lightroom.
Part 1: 7 Free Lightroom Plugins
Top 1: Focus Mask
Focus Mask is a simple Lightroom plugin to highlight the areas that are in focus. It is available to Lightroom 4 and later. If you want to make a color splash, it is a good option.
Top 2: LRTimelapse
LRTimelapse is a Lightroom plugin to create time-lapse videos using your photos and video clips. It can help you to batch edit photos. It comes with both a free and a paid version, but the free version is enough for basic editing.
Top 3: Hypertyle
Hypertyle is the filter plugin for Lightroom. It provides texture, surface, paint, erosion, effects, and over one hundred presets. So that you can stylish your photos in Lightroom with a single click.
Top 4: Bulk
Bulk is the Lightroom plugin that allows you to apply noise-related development settings automatically. Briefly, it helps you to denoise photos in Lightroom in batch. Plus, it will edit each picture based on ISO, sensitivity, and exposure.
Top 5: Lumosmax Lightroom Presets Collection
If you are processing wedding photos and other portraits, this free Lightroom plugin is a necessary part of your photo editor. It is available to both Lightroom Classic and CC. It is a package of presets, not a single plugin.
Top 6: Pastel Lightroom Plugin
Though Lightroom is a powerful photo editor, it is hard to create various effects manually. Pastel Lightroom Plugin is the Lightroom plugin to help you apply the pastel effect with the presets. Moreover, it contains plentiful presets.
Top 7: JPEG Optimizer
JPEG Optimizer is a free Lightroom plugin released by a developer team. You can get it from Adobe Exchange directly. This plugin can compress your JPEG files without losing quality.
Part 2: 7 Professional Lightroom Plugins
Top 1: Luminar
Luminar is a popular photo editor program. But you can install it as a plugin for Lightroom or Photoshop as well. Then your photo editor will get more features related to color modifying.
Top 2: Intensify Lightroom Plugin
Intensify is the Lightroom plugin released by the same developer with Luminar. It contains dozens of pro presets to adjust the structure, sharpness, detail, and contrast of your photos. It is a way to enhance your photos.
Top 3: Aurora HDR
Aurora HDR is a full-featured application as well as a Lightroom plugin. Once you install it on your computer, you can use all features in your Lightroom, such as create HDR images with your photos.
Top 4: Color EFex Pro
Color EFex Pro is a plugin for Lightroom and other photo editors. The primary feature is to correct and enhance color in your photos and images. Once you install the plugin, it will add to Lightroom’s filter menu.
Top 5: The Fader
This Lightroom plugin is shareware. If you want to make custom opacity in Lightroom, this plugin will simplify your job. It costs $10. And you will get all the advanced controls.
Top 6: Noiseless
Sometimes, your photos may contain noises due to software or hardware issues. In such a case, this Lightroom plugin will be pretty helpful.
Top 7: Sleeklens
Sleeklens is a Lightroom plugin for portraits. You can use custom brushes to make your selfies and portraits better easily.
Part 3: Lightroom Plugin Alternative Portrait Pro
Though there are a lot of plugins for Lightroom, they still need to install. It means that your extra payment in addition to the photo editor. From this point, we recommend WidsMob Portrait Pro. Its main features include:
- Polish, correct, and enhance photos without extra software.
- Offer a portrait retouching tool to touch up selfies.
- Support a wide range of photo formats.
- Protect the photo quality while editing.
How to Touch up Photos without Lightroom Plugin
Step 1: Import a photo
Launch the best alternative to Lightroom and plugin once you install it on your computer. Then drag and drop a photo that you want to edit into the interface. Alternatively, go to File -> Open and open the desired picture.
Step 2: Edit photo easily
After photo loading, the Lightroom alternative will detect your face automatically. Then you can touch it up with the Presets. If you want to polish the photo manually, go to the Edit tab and modify each option. Moreover, you can save the adjustment as preset and use it in your other pictures. To compare the effect with the original photo, click View -> Before/After.
Step 3: Save and share photo
After editing the photo, you have two methods to output it:
Save photo：Click the Save button at the upper right corner, and then enter the filename, tags, location, format, and quality. Finally, click the Save button.
Share photo: Hit the Share button. Choose the target channel, such as Facebook, and follow the onscreen instructions to post the picture to social media.
Conclusion
Based on the sharing above, you should master at least the top 14 best Lightroom plugins. They can help you to process photos in Lightroom and make the job easier. Some of them are free of charge, but others need some payment. You can pick the proper one according to your purpose. If you do not like Lightroom, WidsMob Portrait Pro is an alternative photo editor. It is not only easy to use but also able to touch up photos without extra software. We hope that our recommendations are helpful.