One of the finest plugins for Adobe's Photoshop (and other bit-based photo editors such as Corel PhotoPaint), Eye Candy from Alien Skin Software continues to add features and ease of use elements. There are some serious enhancements to the latest version, Eye Candy 4000, that will greatly improve your ability to make interesting effects with your images.
   (For an earlier review of the previous version, which discusses filters not mentioned in this review, click here.)
   While there are five new filters in Eye Candy 4000, it is what Alien Skin has done with the interface, on the one hand, and the adding of flexibility on the other, that makes Eye Candy 4000 an extremely good solution for bitmap editor users.
  Our personal favorite of the new filters is Drip, which gives the impression of paint dripping out of the image. See our dripping rainbow on the left. That you can, essentially, achieve this effect with one mouse click is beside the point, since the drip filter also allows huge variations in the drips such as the taper value of the drip, the amount of variation in the drip's thickness and width, length and spacing of drips. And that's just the drips themselves. There is a separate lighting tab, which almost all the filters boast. Essentially, the lighting settings let you deal with the three-dimensionness of the drips. All this is so varied you will be glad there is the easy ability to save your settings when you want to do, essentially the same thing again.
   Also new is corona, which is much different from a glow filter, as you can see on the right. The corona is designed to be astronomical in nature, to produce solar flares and gassy clouds. You will see the glow has a "pattern" makeup that looks really outstanding in a variety of uses.
   Probably the neatest element you can adjust is the waver of the corona, which adjusts how the flares themselves are bent. This is very different from something such as glow width, which is a common control in glow filters and, generally, determines the distance the glow extends from the selection.
   A nice thing about these filters is that they also come with quite a number of presets. Sometimes the preset is exactly what you're looking for; in addition, they have a really excellent learning value. Using a preset will show you what changes do what stuff. Very handy.
   Two of the other new filters are wood and marble. Both yield handsome backgrounds (or foregrounds) of, well, wood and marble. Some of the things you can vary with wood are grain and knotholes while marble lets you control vein size, roughness and the like. You see how rich the wood filter makes our logo look on the left. Both these filters, as well as others, allow you to make seamless tiles. This is very useful for web page backgrounds – or any backgrounds for that matter where you want the tile to repeat without a seam.
   The neatness of the filters themselves aside – and they are, indeed, way cool – it is what Eye Candy does with them that makes this an outstanding package.
   Several of the filters use a bevel profile editor. Anyone who has worked with bevels is probably familiar with rounded, mesa and flat bevels, but with the bevel profile editor, you can have absolutely any bevel you can imagine. The chrome and glass filters have the bevel profile editor built-in, but the bevel boss filter allows you to apply bevels to anything.
   It is also easy to apply different filters to the same thing because you can switch between them from within Eye Candy 4000. That means, if you want a drip and smoke, you can do both things within Eye Candy 4000 without having to exit back to Photoshop. With Eye Candy 4000's limitless undos, this really extends the usefulness of this feature.
   Any program worth compiling these days has a drop shadow ability, but I really like Eye Candy 4000's for ease of use and flexibility. There is precious little you cannot do with this shadow filter, which is aptly named shadow lab. The shadow on the right is a really simple one, but it seems more realistic than many we've used.
   If you are at all familiar with the color gradient tool in Photoshop, the color gradient editor in Eye Candy 4000 will be a delight. It is incorporated with the gradent glow and star filters and, frankly, is a teriffic way to blend a glow into transparency, among other things.
   A final word about the manual. It is short and sweet, but absolutely complete and does not send you hunting all over the place to find out how a control works. If you are working with the fur filter, for instance, all the explainations for the lighting tab are right there, they do not refer you to the explanation of the controls explained with the chrome filter.
   You can do some amazing and outrageous things with Eye Candy 4000. At the same time, so many of the staples of current artwork – shadows, motion blur, bevels, carves and cutouts – are all here, too. Eye Candy 4000 is a great blend of utility and fun and, in that regard, the top of the line in the current market.

   Connect to the Alien Skin web site.