Alien Skin s Eye Candy


Alien Skin's Eye Candy

I love this company. Not only do Alien Skin's designers produce great products, but they also have a wicked sense of humor. One of their promotional T-shirts reads, "Saturate the Industry with Freaks." Whether or not you qualify as a freak (and I'm sure some of you do), you're going to love Eye Candy. It comes in both Macintosh and Windows flavors, and can be found at your local software store or mail-order source for about $150. You can buy it online at http://www.alienskin.com, and you can also download a demo version for free.

Some of the Eye Candy effects are probably not for everyday use, unless your day job is designing covers for a science fiction magazine. Others, however, like Bevel Boss and Shadowlab, can be very useful.

The Alien Skin interface changes according to the effect you're applying, but the basic screen (shown in Figure 19.2) remains the same.

Figure 19.2. Alien Skin's Eye Candy, applying some fur to a selection.

As of the current version, there are 23 Eye Candy effects, including Chrome, Fur, Drip, Melt, Smoke, Fire, Jiggle, Squint, Swirl, and a lot more. You can adjust all possible parameters of each of these effects, making the chrome shiny or dull; the fur wavy, long, or curly; the smoke dense or wispy; or whatever you can think of.

Applying many of these effects requires first selecting an area to which the effect will be applied, or adding a layer for it. A few, like Antimatter, simply do their thing. Antimatter inverts an image's brightness without affecting the colors or saturation value. Darks become light, and lights go dark, while colors and intensity stay the same. Figure 19.3 shows Eye Candy using the Fire filter to set fire to a very lazy cat.

Figure 19.3. You might not use this every day, but it's fun.

Eye Candy's Star filter, shown in Figure 19.4, is another of my favorites. It draws stars, blats (those odd-shaped , pointy designs they often use in ads to say "Sale" or "New Low Price"), and other little pointy things, with as many points as you want, shading them in three dimensions. These are great for pepping up a web page. Create them in Photoshop, and then jump over to ImageReady and assign rollover actions. (You'll learn how to do this in Hour 24, "Photoshop for the Web.")

Figure 19.4. How many points on a star? With this filter, you can have up to 50.

Splat!

Splat! is another fun plug-in from Alien Skin. It creates frames , edge treatments , background fills and textures, surface textures, and mosaics. Splat! comes with a very large collection of images: some abstract, some strange , some beautiful and useful. Although you might not want to frame your girlfriend's portrait with cereal or teeth (complete with roots), white roses are nice. There are also lovely Art Nouveau edges, licensed from Dover Fine Arts. Of course, you can add your own image stamps, too.

Be sure to check out Splat!'s texturizers. They are much more interesting than Photoshop's canvas and sandstone. The Splat! collection's interface, shown in Figure 19.5, is easy and intuitive.

Figure 19.5. Splat! makes it easy to jazz up this baby portrait by filling in the background with autumn leaves .

As is true of any of these tools, the more you explore, the more you'll learn about working with it. Some filters can take quite a long time to apply, especially if you push density settings to their highest points (and this is true of both third-party and Photoshop-native filters). Don't assume that your system has frozen if you don't see any movement for as much as a minute. The math involved in remapping each pixel in a swirl effect would make Einstein choke . Be patient. The computer is thinking as fast as it can.

Xenofex 2

Yet another terrific set of plug-in tools from the Alien Skin folks, Xenofex 2 is the new version of a long-time favorite. Within its 14 effects are filters to shatter, stain , burn the edges, make a mosaic or jigsaw puzzle, or cover your picture with clouds or stars, or make it look like it's printed on crumpled paper, just to name a few. Figure 19.6 shows a picture of a hot varsity basketball game, as a jigsaw puzzle. You can, of course, vary the size of the pieces, and the complexity.

Figure 19.6. One of the 14 Xenofex effects.



Teach Yourself Adobe Photoshop CS 2 In 24 Hours
Sams Teach Yourself Adobe Photoshop CS2 in 24 Hours
ISBN: 0672327554
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 241
Authors: Carla Rose

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