There are a number of Photoshop plugins (esp. Imagenomic Real Grain) of which I am especially fond. Theoretically I should be able to duplicate their results "by hand" in Photoshop, and perhaps even in other editors, but as a practical matter I can't.
Are there any "third party" image editors that support Photoshop plugins? Photoshop is fine for my "heavy duty" computers (although I really, really, really dislike "renting" software), but it uses a painfully large percentage of the resources on my MacBook Air.
Obviously I would prefer a Mac program, but Parallels works so well these days that I can manage Windows programs on my Macs if necessary.
Myron
P.S. Do any of you know enough about programming PS plugins to explain briefly how they "integrate" into the PS environment? It is not easy to gain access to the development kit for Photoshop... or reverse engineer a plugin to see what it is doing.