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Provides: Photoshop filters to enhance and alter your digital images

Developer: Alien Skin Software

Requirements: Mac OS X v10.2.6 or later, Photoshop 7 or later (CS2 compatible), Photoshop Elements 2 or later, Macromedia Fireworks MX 2004 or later

Retail Price: $99 (upgrade from previous version $49)

The old effects have been improved and the new effects are, well, new. But combined, Alien Skin Software has once again provided a collection of nifty effects for your digital images. The three fully new effects are: Backlight, Brushed Metal and Extrude. The other seven have all been upgraded from Eye Candy 4000: Bevel, Chrome, Glass, Gradient Glow, Motion Trail, Perspective Shadow and Super Star. There are few here that an expert in Photoshop cannot do by himself, but Eye Candy 5: Impact can do it all and do it well, even if you are not a Photoshop expert.

To use any of the effects, select any image, or layer from within an image, and from the Filter menu, drag down to "Alien Skin Eye Candy 5: Impact." From the drop-down menus are all the selections. Any time you open any image, you see the basic Eye Candy screen above. One of the great things about Eye Candy is that you are not limited to a dinky sized window to work with your image. The size allotted to the image can be as big as you can make the window on your screen. The only limitation is that you cannot change the size of the left or top part of the the window. Either way, you can zoom in or out as necessary.

The top left section is where a number of factory defaults, or pre-sets are listed under the tab "Settings." The next tab, "Basic" provides the various controls for you to fine-tune any image's effects. The range of controls varies depending on the effect. Lastly is an option for "Colors" which not all effects provide. Above the image are four buttons, the left one is a dead-mans button: press it and any effects disappear so you can see your image without the effect. As soon as you take your mouse off the button, the effects reappear. Next is a hand to push your image around (if you are zoomed greater than can be seen on the screen). Like Photoshop, pressing the Space bar turns the cursor into a hand at any time. Next to the hand is the zoom tool, and, lastly, if the effect has anything that you can push around the window, an arrow to facilitate the pushing. To the right of the Arrow is an option to vary the background. Some of the effects can only be done on layers within images (not the whole image itself) and if, for example, you are creating a white effect, you cannot see that on a white background so you can change it to either black, grey, white, or custom color as needed on the fly. Unfortunately, you cannot see how the altered layer will look against the real background until you accept the effect.

The bottom left of the window has User Saved settings. Any default setting can be tweaked, and any of these "tweakings" can be saved, e-mailed to friends and family, and imported (by clicking on the Manage button to the right of Save on the bottom left of the window).

While the specific controls vary for each effect, there are several constants as can be shown below. The biggest one is that most of the effects can be saved into their own layer. Depending on the effect, this might be above or below the effect (see the check box on the top of the window below). Another consistency is how each dynamic and parameter can be altered or tweaked. Lastly, the effects can be randomly altered by clicking on the Random Seed button. This generates random something-or-other so that each time you click on it, you change the effect. It's like continually clicking on the Shuffle button in iTunes to change the order of your songs.

The results of all of the effects vary considerably, and the more you work with Eye Candy, the more you will learn what you can and cannot, should and should not do to any image. Some effects work, and some defaults of some effects may work better than other defaults. You really need to experiment and play.

By the way, any text you alter via Eye Candy must be rasterized for the effect to take place. That means that you cannot change the text after the effect.

The following are some examples from my playing...

Backlight

Here I lit afire a brass bell on a cement stand, and imposed in the corner is a white glare from some text (my name). Despite the improbability of both, the effects are easy to do. The screen shot just before the image above is the "Basic" tab used for Backlight.

Bevel

This is similar to the standard bevel in Photoshop, but there are significant levels of extra control, not to mention that surfaces can have textures (shown 2nd image down). Most of the presets have shading inside the image, which I found myself constantly turning off as I found it made the image too dark. As I was experimenting with Bevel, I realized I didn't like how I constantly had to click back and forth between Settings and Basic just to click a check-box. More on this at the end of the article.

The image below is an image (about 4 x 6 feet) of a pinned beetle that was a flat canvas against a flat white background. I placed the beetle's image on its own layer to create a border (ergo Frame) on the canvas, and then the image as a whole. Any item you have in its own layer can be beveled, and the outline of the bevel will follow the contours of the shape of the object.

Brushed Metal

Using the same image as above, I used a Bevel effect on the beetle image, but one with a light texture. On the background, I used a brushed metal background that I then beveled. To display some of the variations available, I've over-imposed a circular gold, hand brushed copper, and brushed steel image (CCW from top right.

Keep in mind that this effect alters the entire surface within any layer and obliterates any image on that layer. Brushed Metal doesn't use any colors or textures of the original layer. It can be used for a background and/or to alter any layer image to look like metal. If your layer is a cut-out shape of mickey mouse, you'd have a brushed metal mickey mouse.

Chrome

I found Chrome to be one of the more frustrating effects. Below, I've got a few examples, but what most of the presets use is not so much variations on how to create the chrome effect, but rather what the chrome is reflecting. The concept is a good point, anything shinny is going to reflect, and they give you a reasonable quantity of preset images to reflect. Plus, you can load any image you want into Eye Candy via clicking the Manage Reflections button and selection "Load." The catch is that the only suggestion they provide for you is to use a small file sized jpg to speed up the Eye Candy process, but they do not provide recommended resolutions or any other suggestions on how to prepare images for the best results. If you can use one of their provided reflections, you will enjoy Chrome, but if you are wanting to use your own image, get ready for a lot of experimentation.

Extrude

Extruding is fairly straightforward; place an item in its own layer and select Extrude. You have control for which direction the item trails off, if the item trails off into infinity, and some variations on color, shading and contrast. Like all of Eye Candy's effects, you can use multiple effects on the same item. In the example on the bottom image, the text was first altered using Photoshop CS2's Warp prior to Extruding. Although I used only text in this example, you can Extrude any item in its own layer.

Glass

Normally, glass is a material (composed of oxides) that is heated to a very high temperature and, upon cooling, becomes thick (like honey) allowing the molecules to arrange themselves into a crystalline alignment. The disorganized alignment is typical of a glassy material. This description has nothing to do with what Eye Candy does to your images, but Eye Candy does allow you to create glassy items out of things that else wise could never be glassified. It seems that Eye Candy uses the same algorithms to smooth out the structure of the layer as it uses in Chrome the effect, but doesn't cover the image with the metallic reflection as it does with Chrome. On the other hand, some of the preset settings have reflections, and you can use the same reflections as are used in Chrome. If you are able to figure out how to design/set your own images, they can be used in either effect.

Gradient Glow

Gradient Glow creates a single or multi-colored gradient glow based on the shape of the object in the layer you are working with. Some of the effects can be placed on their own layer below the object, but none of them can be created on a separate layer above the object layer. If not placed on a separate layer, the effect takes over the object image as seen below on the bottom right. The solution to this limitation is to create the effect layer below your object layer, and then drag it above after it is created. Other controls include changing colors, the degree of spread of the gradient, etc. Once created, one can always continue to alter the effect by playing with the transparency of the layer as I did in the image in the upper right, seen below.

Motion Trail

There is a difference between motion and blur. If you are trying to take a photo of a moving object, and your lens speed is not fast enough, you do not get a photo of a dog or athlete moving, you get a blur. But if your lens speed is fast enough to get your objective, you end up with a static image that often times doesn't really convey the sense of movement. If you really, really want the effect of motion, use Motion Trail. Once you have your object in its own layer and select Motion Trail from Eye Candy, you have a variety of pre-sets to select from that provide a line coming from your object, letting you drag the end of the line around to set the direction. At the mid-point on the line is another handle that lets you bend the line as a spline, if desired. Other alterations let you vary the opacity of the trailing trail, the amount of taper, and how much the original selection will be masked (the less masked, the less in focus the line will be). After you've created one Motion Trail, when re-selected, the same settings remain. Thus, when I was getting the shadow of the ball (see the image below), all I had to do was to re-apply the Motion Trail effect to a different layer and I was done.

My only complaint about this effect is that it cannot be a separate layer; the effect alters the layer itself. Thus, if you are doing a multi-layered effect (as seen below) and you wish to fine tune an earlier effect, you lose everything you've done before hand. I would have liked to have increased the transparency of the balls shadow seen below. The problem with how the software currently exists is that one cannot really determine how an effect will appear against the original background until you accept what you've done in the Eye Candy dialog. If you do not like what you've done, you have to undo the change, go back into Eye Candy, make an adjustment and see how that looks. As this effect does not create a new separate layer, you cannot alter the transparency on the fly.

Perspective Shadow

If there is one effect that sells Eye Candy, this is it. One of the more popular effects in Photoshop is the drop shadow. Look in just about any web site and most adds in magazines, and you will see a drop shadow. As great as this effect is to create the feeling of depth, a drop shadow doesn't come anywhere near what a real shadow looks like. The concept is one we all know well: an object closer to the shadow surface will be more vivid than when the object is further away. A drop shadow can't do this; the shadow is equal in vividness, transparency and position the entire way around the image. Fortunately Perspective Shadow can properly display shadows. Below is a photo of my dog (recently made into glass, above). On the left is a common drop shadow (made with one of the options of Perspective Shadow), and on the right, I used Perspective Shadow. The only thing I can add to what you see below is that this effect allows the user to save the effect as a layer below the original layer. You don't need sliced bread any more.

Super Star

If you remember the old television series Batman (and comparing that show with the current movie Batman returns is like comparing Ripple with a wine from the Paso Robles region of California), you might remember that when Batman hit someone, giant cartoon stars would appear on the screen saying the words "Pow!" and "Wham!" Well, if you need to create such stars, or flower-like images, or gears, or strange globular shapes, Super Star should be just what you are looking for. Like the effect Brush Metal, this effect doesn't require or use any image or image colors on the layer you are working with. To show a sample of the Basic tab, I've shown a screen shot of this effect's controls. Once you've selected a pre-set effect, you move into the Basic tab to alter and fine-tune. As you can see, any creation from this effect can remain in its own layer. This is good because you can create multiple "stars" onto multiple layers to create a variety of effects and moods.

While there's no doubt that some of these effects are better than others, there's even greater doubt that anyone will find every effect wonderful and useful. But with ten effects, there's bound to be something worthwhile, and perhaps, with time, you might find use for the majority of the effects.

Regardless of my appreciation of any specific effect, I do like much of Eye Candy. In particular, I really like the large view of my image, and I really like how most of the effects can be saved into a separate layer. On the other hand, my biggest complaint (and this is a biggy) is that I did not like how there were separate tabs for Settings and Basic. I found myself clicking back and forth between the pre-sets and the controls over and over to find the best combination. I found this to be inefficient and frustrating. I would have preferred for the User Settings to be the separate tab and the Basic be placed beneath the Settings. If there is an Eye Candy 5.1, this is the one thing that must be fixed.

Another annoyance: If you click a pre-set, it becomes "active" in blue, and the result will show up on the image to the right. So far, so good. But, if you click on the Basic tab and alter anything and then tab back to the Settings tab, any indication as to which pre-set you are working on will be removed, and there is no indication as to which pre-set you started your alterations from. It would have been better if the altered pre-set would provide some indication that you are working on "that" preset and it no longer is in its original state. Consider a check mark or something to remind you what the original effect was.

In short, this is a great set of extra tools for image alteration. I would love to have given this a full 5 "A" rating, but my frustration of going back and forth between Settings and Basic got to me. I also found that the lack of information on how to create images for use with the Chrome (and Glass) settings to be very frustrating. I will have to play and experiment more with this to see if I can come up with a more fool-proof approach. [If I come up with anything I'll let you know in a "How To" article here at Applelinks.] Meanwhile, I would also like to make a feature request for Alien Skin: the ability to slide any image around within the reflection of Chrome to better center any reflection.

___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.