Eye Candy 6: Review

Eye Candy 6

Alien Skin’s latest plug-in is a feast for the senses

Eye Candy by Alien Skin Software has long been the Photoshop plug-in of choice for those keen to create realistic textures in their images, without the hassle and hard work of creating them from scratch.
It’s fast and easy to install – you can use it within minutes. In just a few moments you have 30 filters and in excess of 1,500 presets at your fingertips, allowing you to get creative right away.

Previous Eye Candy users will notice the enhanced interface. It’s far more streamlined and accessible, making it easier to find what you’re looking for among the numerous options available. Settings are now grouped together into distinct categories, with a slider interface to help you create exactly the look you want. Once you’ve fired up Photoshop, Eye Candy 6’s Filters panel can be accessed via the Extensions menu. With the image, object or text you want to customise open, you simply select the type of texture or text effect you want to apply. Effects are split into two sections: Text & Selection, and Textures. The former is a group of effects that would normally be best applied to text and logos, whereas the latter is designed for use with larger selections and whole images – for instance to create textured backgrounds.

Once you’ve picked an effect, a new window opens revealing a preview of your image and a range of options on the left, arranged in a folder hierarchy. The effects available include a wide range of realistic presets such as Wood, Glass and Chrome, in addition to Animal Fur. When editing text the choice is simply mind-boggling, and you’ll have hours of fun sifting through all the options, including a range of textures, shadows and other realistic effects that will make your logos stand out from the crowd. The Textures category is even more impressive. Although the plug-in isn’t primarily designed to work with photos, you can create some interesting results working on selections in digital images, adding textures to backgrounds, objects and people’s skin, for example.

Fire: The Fire filter is excellent, with a huge range of presets to choose from. We also added a Chrome effect to the text layer and altered the colours reflected in it to match the fire

As if this wasn’t enough, once you’ve found a preset you want to use you can customise it further to ensure your finished image looks precisely as you envisioned. Take the Animal Fur effect. You can alter everything from the length and frequency of the hairs on your subject’s surface to the hair direction and depth of the shadows created – the results are very impressive. Other notable features include the ability to work with the 64-bit version of Photoshop and in the CMYK colour space – a boon for professional-level users working on large images in particular.

Users also benefit from the innovative Gallery Wrapper, designed to help print images to go on 3D media-like canvases, where portions of an image may need to be wrapped around a framework, for example. A Button Maker quickly creates styles for use on the web, directly from your own text selections. It’s a good idea in theory, but there’s a disappointing lack of options, unlike every other aspect of the software. We can’t cover every facet of this software in such a short space, but rest assured there’s plenty to explore and you’ll get some stunning results. If you’re a graphic or web designer, Eye Candy 6 really is a feast for the senses.

www.alienskin.com/eyecandy/