Xaos Tools

   OK, here's what we're goning to do.
   Its the annual Julius Caesar Festival at your kid's school and lucky Junior has to do a poster as part of his class project. Luckily, he found a picture of the ol' guy in Encarta, but what to do now?
   (Did Junior mention he is flirting with a "C" in History and it will take a super poster to get him solidly into the "B" range? We thought not. But, Xaos Tools to the rescue.)
   Junior has been fooling around in Photoshop trying to do something with the picture of Julie when you remind him that you read a review in Rainbow-PCM about Xaos Tools and ordered a copy. Like magic, the UPS guy delivered it the other day, you installed it, but forgot to mention it to the younf heir. You fire up Xaos Tools, spend about 15 minutes with it, and come up with the poster on the right which not only gets the kid a "B" but has him close to an "A."

What did the teacher like about the poster? Was it the fancy lettering with bevels, extrusions and the whole bit, done with TypeCaster? Or was it the very nifty terrazzo look to the background with lots of images of Julie sort of ghosted in? Both effects were done really easily and professionally with Xaos Tools.
TypeCaster lets you play with characters to your heart's content (hint, hint, if you have symbol fonts, you can use them, too). Bevels, extrusions, colors, textures. You name it. Any font on your system. Once you have all that down, you can manipulate your text in 3D space, add lights of various colors and generally spiff them up all sorts of ways.




	Actually, we added the type after having a ball in this window, with Terrazzo. With more than a dozen different patterns to choose from, we selected the simple pinwheel and produced a tile of Julie's face like you see in the middle of the screen above (you can save the tile for further use). Terrazzo lets you adjust all sorts of things about the area you are using to make the tile, but as you can see from the adjustment frame on the left, we basically took most of Julie's face (the inner square). The outer square represents the feathering which was applied from the slider below. We adjusted the opacity with the other slider to obtain the ghost effect, applied the Terrazzo to Photoshop and got Junior his "B." Xaos Tools let us play with all of this to our heart's content and, while the controls seem simple here, they give a wide variety of options to do all sorts of things. This is a powerful Photoshop add-in that really gives some unique capabilities to the program. Besides TypeCaster and Terrazzo, Xaos Tools features Paint Alchemy, which is just that, a magician with a whole magic book of styles which you can apply to images or selected parts of them. While some of the built-in fulters in Photoshop do some of these kinds of things, you may think Paint Alchemy is overkill, but believe me it isn't. The variety of things you can do with it, the effects you can generate and the creative forces you can unleash (sometimes, even by accident) are absolutely amazing. Xaos Tools is a very worthy addition to your Photoshop arsenal. Connect to the Xaos Tools web site.