The Custom Panel plug-in makes it easy to customise Photoshop. Gather your most-used features in a panel that you design, to make editing simpler and more efficient.…
Why you should customise Photoshop, briefly
Customizing Photoshop streamlines and accelerates your creative process. Your environment works for you, with your most-used features right where you want them. Investing a little effort in customisations pays off big time by cutting out the mental friction of navigating through menus and mousing around. It’s about optimizing your environment to work smarter, not harder. (See my companion article to this one about 4 ways to customise Photoshop and streamline your creativity.)
Custom panels enhance Photoshop by taking customisation to a new level, beyond what you can adjust in Photoshop natively.
What is the Custom Panel plug-in for Photoshop?
The Custom Panel plug-in consolidates your most-used Photoshop tools, features, adjustments, and more in one place. You get quick access whether you’re using a mouse or a pen and tablet. It complements your own keyboard shortcuts, actions, and custom workspaces.
A custom panel is different from a custom workspace. You can and should create your own custom workspaces in Photoshop. In Photoshop, custom workspaces allow users to tailor how Photoshop looks by showing, hiding, and moving Photoshop’s native panels and tools. However, custom workspaces don’t allow you to create new panels that collect different features.
On the other hand, a custom panel lets you combine different features and functions in a single panel. You can have buttons for tools, brushes, adjustments, actions, and basically anything available in Photoshop.
Custom panels can be as simple or elaborate as you want. As with custom workspaces, you can create separate custom panels for different uses. You might have one panel optimised for retouching, and another for landscape photography, and yet another for architectural photography, whatever works for you.
You need a plug-in to create custom panels in Photoshop. Adobe used to offer a “configurator” but that’s no longer available.
Several custom panel plug-ins are available, both free and paid. Depending on the plug-in, you can have as many panel setups as you want.
Let’s take a look at one of the custom panel plug-ins that I like and use: the Custom Panel for Photoshop by Mantas Kačinskas. This review covers version 3.6.0 (2025).
Overview of the Custom Panel plug-in
Developed by photographer and PHP developer Mantas Kačinskas, the key benefits of his Custom Panel plug-in include:
- Create custom layouts using rows, columns, tabs, buttons, and widgets.
- Assign any Photoshop function or feature to buttons, including menu items, tools, actions, adjustment layers, blend modes, and more.
- Widgets include opacity and blend-if sliders.
- Selection indicator flags when you have a hidden selection or less than 50% selected (which won’t show up as marching ants).
- Multiple panels, and selectable “spaces” within each panel.
- Fully adjustable: resize and place it however and wherever you want.
- Back up and restore panels for safekeeping, as well as migrating or sharing with other devices.
- Optimize workflow by consolidating actions into single history states.
- Enhance productivity with features that go beyond Photoshop’s default capabilities.
Here’s a quick introductory video by the developer Mantas that shows the full-featured version of his Custom Panel in action.
How does it look?
You design your custom panels with this plug-in, so they look however you wish. Here are some examples:
Since you can configure multiple panels, each including multiple “spaces”, you have almost complete flexiblity. The point of the plug-in is to allow you to enhance Photoshop to support your individual ways of working.
Key features
Personalised layouts
Design your custom panels with a flexible setup of rows, columns, and tabs, letting you organize your tools and commands to fit your workflow. You can assign an immense variety of functions to buttons within your custom panel—including tools, menu items, adjustment layers, actions, blend modes, and more—so everything you need is a click or two away.
You configure “spaces” on panels, collections of functional elements that you can switch among with a click.
You can configure how you switch between spaces on a panel either via a dropdown or a slider.
The ability to switch from one functional group to another allows you to keep your Photoshop workspace in place, and bring workflow-specific tools up and ready.
The number of spaces available depends on which version of the plug-in you pay for. The Free version supports one space, while the Pro version supports 25(!), and the different paid tiers in between each support three spaces.
Selection indicator
When you have a selection that you’ve hidden or a selection that’s less than 50% opacity, you can configure the Custom Panel to display an indicator: a dashed white line (similar to marching ants). The selection indicator can display only on top of the panel or all the way around:
Fully responsive
Resize panels, dock them to either side of Photoshop, or let them float. And your panels are theme-aware—they adjust their colour scheme to match how you configure the Photoshop interface.
Auto-hide the panel
Another nice touch is the ability to automatically hide the panel when you click a panel button. That gives you back useful screenspace until you need to use the panel again. You can of course leave the panel displayed after button clicks, and manually show/hide it whenever you want.
Enhanced layer management
With enhanced layer actions, you can perform tasks that aren’t possible in Photoshop natively. This includes navigating and managing multiple layers simultaneously and collapsing or expanding multiple groups at once.
Creating, inverting, and deleting masks on multiple layers
Select multiple layers and apply pixel, vector, or channel masks all at once. This saves time and ensures consistency across your selected layers. This short demo shows how you can manage masks on multiple selected layers:
Collapsing and expanding groups
Manage complex documents easily by collapsing or expanding all groups with a single click. This makes navigation much more intuitive when dealing multiple grouped layers. It declutters your layers panel, making it easier to locate and edit specific elements within your project. You maintain a clear overview of your work more easily.
Simplified document history
Actions run from the panel are consolidated into a single history state. That simplifies the undo process and keeps the history panel cleaner and easier to understand and navigate.
For example, I have an action that applies image to a new layer, then converts that layer to a smart object. Running that action from a button on a Custom Panel, I see a single history item for that action, and it’s clearly labeled as an action. But when I run that action directly from the Actions panel, I see each step involved in that action with no indication that each step was added by action versus manually. For a simple action like this, that may not make much difference to your workflow.
But if you have more complex actions, being able to see clearly and quickly what happened in your history whether triggered by an action or by you manually can make a real difference. It also simplifies undo, to roll back to before you ran that action.
Image navigation
Add buttons for zooming, panning, or other navigation-related commands that streamline movement within your document.
Back up and restore
Another important touch is the ability to back up (export) your settings wherever you want, and restore them. That makes rolling back to a prior configuration easy in case of mistakes or Photoshop failures. It also means you can save your configurations and install them on another computer, and share them with team members (assuming everyone has a valid license).
Unique usability example: “space” vs “space popup”
As an example of the thoughtfulness behind this plug-in, you have two different ways to work with a panel. When talking about the different ways you use the plug-in, terminology matters. As I mentioned above, the word “panel” refers to the panel that you can float or dock. Each panel contains one or more “spaces” that contain whatever buttons, tools, etc you want.
A “space popup” is an independent popup window displaying a specific space on a panel. You activate a space popup via a keyboard shortcut.
A panel space and its space popup each contain the same elements, but suit different situations. The panel space is good for when you’re using your mouse or pen, and the popup suits when you’re keyboard-oriented.
This attention to different use cases and workflows is evident throughout the design of Custom Panel Pro. Mantas Kačinskas brings his user experience as a photographer to his development of the plug-in. You can really tell when a photographer guides the development of photo-editing software, by these thoughtful touches.
Easy to use
Because you can place your custom panel(s) anywhere you want, they’re easy to find and use. Plus, you can work with them either mouse-only, mouse-and-keyboard, and keyboard-only, whenever.
Normally a panel is mouse-only.
But you can configure keyboard shortcuts to open specific panel spaces as floating popups. You can then use your mouse on the floating space popup just as you would do when using the panel itself.
If you also assign single-key shortcuts to any buttons on a space, then when you activate that space as a popup, you can press the button shortcut to “press” the button. That’s a nice touch, because you’re already working with the space popup via the keyboard, and if you like working with the keyboard at that point, you can.
Easy to configure
Out-of-the-box, you’re presented with a clean slate. There are no pre-configured designs. Instead you configure it however you like. Configuration is very simple, once you get the hang of it.
You have a variety of options when configuring your custom panels. Each element (spaces, buttons, rows, and columns) have their own specific configuration settings. But in general they allow you to name elements, display or hide names, assign icons and colours, etc.
Here’s an example, the button configuration dialog, which is self-explanatory:
A cool configuration option: right click on a button to pull up the button configuration dialog, without going into panel or space settings. And if you have row and column labels visible, you can right-click on those also, to bring up their configuration dialogs. Thoughtful details like that make refining your panels even easier.
Mantas has a page on his website that clearly explains the various configuration components.
Installation
You can download the plugin from Sven’s website:
The download links are somewhat hidden at the bottom of the feature comparison table:
https://www.pscustompanel.com/#download
Pricing
Mantas Kačinskas offers several versions of the plug-in: Free (limited functionality), Lite (some added features), Basic (a more full-flavoured version), Plus (almost everything), and Pro (the whole package).
The Free version is a good no-risk demo. You can get the feel of how to create a panel and decide if a paid version offers extra value to you. And free always helps when cash is tight. It’s generous of Mantas to offer that option.
Once I grew comfortable with the concept and workflows involved in designing a custom panel for myself, I quickly decided that the extra features in a paid version would pay off in additional time and effort savings.
For pricing on all versions, click here.
(Originally, I wrote a review of the Free version of this plug-in. Mantas gave me a limited-time Pro license gratis so I could review all the features ultimately available. That was helpful so I could get a clear picture of the entire scope of the plug-in. Mantas’ kind offer didn’t affect my opinion at all: I think Custom Panel is a fantastic plug-in.)
Support
All versions of the Custom Panel plug-in—from Free to Pro—receive support and updates at no additional cost. If you have a lifetime license, then you get support and updates permanently. Of course, if you take a subscription, then support and updates are free of extra charge as long as you keep your subscription current.
The developer here shares a similar support approach as Greg Benz with his Lumenzia and Web Sharp Pro plug-ins (which I use and love). It’s a great way to keep licensing simple, and build customer loyalty.
Anything missing?
Configuring a Custom Panel space is a multi-step process. It’s not difficult, just time consuming to get things the way you want. And that process is inevitable given the wide flexiblity available to you. Simplifying that process at least somewhat would make it a little easier, for example enabling drag-and-drop from a list of features onto a panel. The developer has told me that drag-and-drop is on his roadmap as a future enhancement.
Alternatives?
In my article about why customising Photoshop enhances creativity, I cover a couple of alternative panel plug-ins. You can read about them here.
The only comparable alternative would be the Configurator Reloaded 2 plug-in. However, comparing like-for-like, that plug-in only matches this Custom Panel plug-in’s most limited paid feature, Basic version. And the Custom Panel Basic version offers more features for less money than Configurator Reloaded 2. So the Custom Panel plug-in is a much better deal.
Summary of the Key Benefits
Personalised workflows: Tailor Photoshop to your specific needs, making your editing process more intuitive and efficient.
Increased productivity: Access frequently used tools and commands quickly, reducing time spent navigating menus.
Advanced functionalities: Perform actions that aren’t possible in Photoshop natively, like creating masks on multiple layers.
Simplified history states: Keep your history panel organized by consolidating multiple action steps into a single state when using actions from the panel.
Visual consistency: Theme-aware design ensures that your custom panel integrates seamlessly with your Photoshop aesthetic.
About Mantas Kačinskas
Mantas Kačinskas is a hobbyist photographer and a full-time PHP developer. His combination of skills in both photography and software development led him to create the Custom Panel plug-in. Recognising the need for a more efficient workflow in Photoshop, he developed this plug-in to help creatives streamline their editing process.
You can contact Mantas on his custom panel website: https://www.pscustompanel.com/
What do you think?
Please let me know if you have any questions or thoughts you want to share in the comments below.
FAQ
What are custom panels in Photoshop?
A custom panel plug-in consolidates your most-used features into one accessible location. They’re visual, mouse-focused, and give you quick access whether you’re using a mouse or a pen and tablet.
Why do I need a custom panel in Photoshop?
Custom panel plug-ins put your most-used features right where you want them, cutting out the distractions and mental friction of navigating through Photoshop menus, panels, etc. They consolidate your most-used features into one accessible location.
How do I create a custom panel in Photoshop?
You need a plug-in to create custom panels in Photoshop. There are a couple of those plug-ins available either in the Adobe Creative Cloud app or by searching for “custom panel Photoshop”.
What features should I look for in a custom panel plug-in?
The key features to look for are creating custom layouts using rows, columns, tabs, and buttons. Assigning any Photoshop function or feature to buttons, including menu items, tools, actions, adjustment layers, blend modes, and more. You’ll need multiple flexibl configurations to suit different workflows.
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