Freeware Friday: The Best At The Adobe Design Center

I often look to the Adobe Design Center for the best in tips, tricks, tutorials and freeware. For this installment of Freeware Friday I thought I’d scour the Design Center for the best Photoshop freeware money can’t buy.

At the Adobe Design Center, look for the Exchange to get all the freeware.

Plasma TV
This is the one currently being featured on the main page, and being a tech-savvy guy I was immediately drawn to the name. This is a complex set of Photoshop actions that can take any landscape image and frame it within a neat-looking plasma TV frame, all generated by the action! As it runs it gives prompts for various inputs (such as the name brand of the TV) and it works very intuitively—though I came across the “No pixels were selected” and “The command ‘Delete’ is not currently available” a time or two. But despite that, this set of actions really wakes one up to the strength of writing actions: most of us have created one to do a simple save-and-close or basic color correction, but I’d guess not as many have constructed entire images with a single action.

JRJ Beatles brushes
Who doesn’t like the Beatles (besides my wife)? Well, there’s a couple brush sets that use art from the Beatles’ record labels, concert posters, jacket art and even the old cartoon series. You can make some exceptional textures from this type of “found” graphic design as long as you’re creative and try different things.

Water Ripples
Water Ripples is one of the most downloaded and highest-rated of all Photoshop freeware on the Design Center. This is a Windows-only plug-in that can create amazingly realistic water ripples. There’s lots of options for surface quality, strength and kind of ripple, and the plug-in generates realistic 3-D effects. Very impressive.

Savage’s Chrome and Steel
Making chrome and steel effects is one of the most fun things to do with Photoshop, and Rik Savage has made a few gradients that recreate the chrome effect. Photoshop already comes with some that do the trick, and it’s not hard to make your own—but don’t let that stop you from using some quality freeware gradients!