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Have you heard about the new Shutterstock plugin for Adobe Photoshop? Shutterstock released a free Photoshop plugin that will simplify your work by letting you browse, download and license stock images, right from your Photoshop canvas.
We decided to review it and let you know how can this plugin help you and how you can use it, just so you can easily see if it’s a good fit for your needs.
If you prefer to watch over reading, check out the video below, which shows you a straightforward presentation about this plugin.
How can you benefit from this plugin?
First of all, if you’re the kind of designer who often works with stock images, this plugin will be a huge time-saver for you. No more searching directly on the website, then downloading the watermarked image, checking if it matches your design and then heading back to the website to download and purchase it. All of these will be a thing of the past. You can now browse Shutterstock without ever leaving Photoshop.
Even better, you can also purchase the photos you like, without leaving the application. You will need an active Shutterstock account if you want to download and license the stock photos. Otherwise, if you just want to use the watermarked photos to show them to your client first, all you need is the plugin, no sign in required.
Browse by stock photo collections.
To minimize the clicks until you find the perfect photo for your project, Shutterstock integrated some photo collections into this plugin. You will find Color Palettes, Emotions, and Utilities, as main categories. Each collection has a bunch of sub-collections. So for ‘Color Palettes’ you will be able to easily search by main colors, such as Red, Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange, and Purple.
For ‘Emotions’, there are 6 main emotion-targeted sub-collections, such as Anger, Love, Joy, Sadness and more. ‘Utilities’ is a collection specifically created for easily finding for stock resources such as mockups (blank templates), photos suitable for text applied onto them, filters, textures, and more.
Editing stock photos has never been easier.
After browsing and finding a photo you like, all you have to do is click on the Insert Preview button and the image will be instantly inserted into your project.
The difference now is that with this plugin you can save time by editing the photos only once! After you chose the photo you like and inserted it into your project, you can edit it by resizing, applying filters, and more, and then, if it’s a good fit, all you have to do is license it. All the edits will be re-applied to the high-quality purchased photo.
No need for you to re-edit the photo. With the help of this plugin, Photoshop will remember all the editing processes you applied to the watermarked, unlicensed image and re-add them to the final photo.
Check your stock photos browsing history.
If you remember that you previewed a photo you liked but didn’t add it to your project and now you’re looking for it again, you can easily find it with just a click! Your browsing history is available from inside the plugin, so you can easily grab all the photos you want and add them to your work.
Look for similar photos
If you need more photos that match a specific criteria, all you have to do is click on the Similar Images tab button, located right below the red button. It will then show you a list of similar images, from the same category. You can also select Similar Model, which works when working with stock photos of people. Take a look at the Featured Collections as well. You will find plenty of stock images in these sub-collections.
Final thoughts…
This plugin is particularly useful for graphic designers, web designers, but also architects/rendering specialists. You will find lots of resources for any kind of project. At the time of writing this review, the plugin works only with Photoshop CC 2014 and Photoshop CC 2015 and it’s available for Mac and PC users. You can download it for free, here.
