Originally written by Designs By Sue - (Screenshots supplied by V Fellows)

Plug-in filters are a wonderful way to create special effects for your elements. Almost all the Photoshop plug-in filters are compatible with PSP and almost all plugins are freely available for you to download and install into your programme.

Before downloading any Plug-in Filters, create a directory on your hard drive or external hard drive into which you can download the zip files. You can then periodically back up this folder and/or make a copy of these zip files on a DVD Rom for future reference. This is a worthwhile thing to do, because if for any reason you have to re-install your plug-ins, it is very time consuming trying to remember what you had and where you found it, especially if the original plug-in supplier no longer has a website.

When working with PSP, it is not necessary to store your Plug-in filters within the actual Paintshop Pro programme itself. You can store them in a dedicated folder within your “My PSP Files” directory (or elsewhere on your hard drive) that PSP creates in “My Documents” when you installed the programme and then point PSP to that Plug-in folder using the “File Locations” preference within your PSP programme.

Installing a Plug-in Filter

Step 1: Download your plug-in file and save it to a dedicated folder on your hard drive.

Step 2: Create a dedicated plug-in filters folder in “My PSP files” where your *.8bf plug-in files will reside.

Step 3: Copy all the files that have an *8bf file extension to your filters folder plus any info and copyright files (text files) - When I do this, I create sub-folders and give them the same name as the filter I am installing.

Step 4: Now from PSP, go to “File” on your top toolbar and down to “Preferences”, then “File Locations” from the drop down list and you will be presented with a dialogue screen like this.

Step 5: Click on the “Add” button and you will be taken to a sub-screen where you can browse your hard drive for the location of your plug-in folder. Once you have located it, click on it to select it and click OK. You will be taken back to your original screen, and your plug-in folder will have been added to the list of locations that PSP will search and use to access your plug-in filters.

Now click OK and the process of pointing PSP to your plug-in filter location will be completed.

Step 6: Before your new plug-in filters will work, you will need to close PSP and re-open it for the new changes to take effect.

Note: This same process of point PSP to your file locations, works for all files that you add to PSP - for example, Brushes, Masks, Bump Maps, Gradients, Textures etc.