Eye Candy

This is an alien.
Not just any alien, mind you, but an Alien Skin alien. Alien Skin is the company which brought us The Black Box, one of the best special effects generators available for PhotoShop and other image-editing programs which support its plugin architecture (such as, for example, Corel Photo Paint and Micrografx Picture Publisher).
After spending some time with The Black Box, one sincerely wondered what is Alien Skin

going to do next? Well, what they have done "next" is updated, added to and generally made more useful their excellent special effects. The result is called, appropriately, Eye Candy. and we're going to use Alien Skin's little alien to show you some of the things you can do with it.
Before we do that, though, we'd like to remind you what wonderful things you can do with the original filters from The Black Box which are now a part of Eye Candy.
Consider if you will:


	This is a "carve" filter, and making this neat graphic was so easy I am almost ashamed to tell you it took about 20 seconds. Nevertheless, that's what it did take and it is just one example of the many outstanding effects – including the illusive drop shadow everyone wants – that were part of the original package and are in Eye Candy.

   For that matter, if you like drop shadows, you're going to love the new perspective shadow filter.Asyou can see, the perspective shadow differs from a drop shadow in that the edges are more defined, although they do not have to be. But just imagine this little effect on your web site or in your next publication.
   Boggles the mind, eh?
   Well, before we show you some of the other neat things you can do with Eye Candy,

we probably should show you how you do all of this stuff. The interface changes according to the filter that is being used, but you basically use sliders to set different parameters. You can also save your settings, view a preview, zoom in or out and make color changes. You have to play with these filters to see everything they can do. Obviously, they do quite a lot.

With aliens, you always have to remember where there's smoke, there's fire. So two of the new filters are named smoke and fire and they deliver effects such as those on the right and the left. By the way, you can re-run these filters on top of each other and you can also re-run the same filter again to get something else to happen. Finally, each filter has about 10 presets so you can see how different things are done.


	This is the metal filter. The example here is an aluminum can but you can make the metallic look to be just about anything you want, including jewelry.


	Here is an example of the jiggle filter. It messes with the insides and outline of the image. Some very interesting effects can be made with this filter.


	Called star, this filter gives you a chance to make multi-colored stars and other similar objects like star-bursts. You can use colors and change the opacity, as illustrated to the left. You might ask: if this is a star, where is the star. The star in this case is set to 99 points, which pretty much makes a circle.


	This little guy is an example of the cutour filter. We left the middle solid but you can, of course, make it transparent. The green background is simply the background of the original file. You could make the background anything you want, such as the second example where we applied the swirl filter to the background to liven things up a bit.

Eye Candy comes with a comprehensive manual which will give you the inside scoop on how the filters work. We learned some new things from the manual about filters from The Black Box we've been using for some time.
Want to dress up your web site or your publications? Eye Candy will do it for you easily and elegantly.

Link to the Alien Skin web site.