The Plugin Site has released Plugin Galaxy 2 for Mac OS X. It costs $70, and a demo version is available.
Plugin Galaxy is a Photoshop-compatible plug-in that generates special effects and image enhancements with more than 160 basic effects, including transparency manipulation, blurring, texture and pattern creation, noise creation, mirroring, warping and much more. It also works with Photoshop Elements, GraphicConverter and Illustrator. It supports both 8-bit and 16-bit RGB and grayscale images.
The new release of Plugin Galaxy is a Universal binary; it offers all effects in a new resizable dialog window and renders more than twice as fast, according to the developer. The Layers and Blend features, new to this release, let you apply multiple effects to the image in a single session and create effects that weren’t possible with version 1. A new batch processing option has been added that lets you apply the same effect to hundreds of images. You can also save and open filter settings and preset files.
Ten new effects, new effect features and 400 presets are included. A new “Play” button generates random slider values, and support for the alpha channel of image layers has been enhanced. The preview now works correctly for selections, as well.