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Provides: Creation of creative effects on objects, selections, and text
Developer: Alien Skin Software
Requirements: PowerPC (G5) or Intel Mac running running Mac OS X v10.5 or later, Photoshop CS3 or later
Retail Price for Eye Candy 6: $249.00
Availability: Out now

"Slick design made easy" is the tag line for Eye Candy. Curiously, the amount of easy depends on within which application you are running the plugin. For many years, Alien Skin's Eye Candy has been one of the most used plugins for creating eye-catching effects for image design enhancement. This current version continues to build on previous versions to provide even more effects and greater variety to make your designs "work." The catch is that working with Eye Candy is at its best if you have Photoshop CS4. If you have Photoshop CS3, it's good. If you have Fireworks CS4 or Photoshop Elements, it's okay. This is partly due to the fact that the amount of features has fully passed the inharent user-interface design limitations, leaving me to say "Slick Design made easy—and even easier if you have the best software." This is not to say I'm disappointed with what Eye Candy can do (it can do wonderful and amazing stuff), only that to get the most productive use out of it, you will want Photoshop CS4.

Eye Candy 6 is an update from the previous Eye Candy 5 - which had three different iterations of 10 different effects each. I did a review of one of them, Impact, here. This new version of Eye Candy has all 30 different effects. If you've used past versions of Eye Candy, the one thing that will truly stand out is a significant increase in speed. Since most Macs nowadays have multi-core processors, this new release does take full use of those multi-cores for a big speed boost.

First off let me give you a quick example of what it can do and why one might chose to use it. Below is an image of snow with some marketing phrase placed on the image in a nice cool color. There's nothing wrong with this image besides its being a bit uninteresting.

Now check out the exact same image with a simple enhancement by Eye Candy 6 that took all of 5 seconds to do:

The 2nd image has the same font, same dropshadow, same text, same everything, but I added a bit of "snow" to the text. Thus, for professional graphic designers or those who wish to add that "extra" to their images that make the image special, Eye Candy is for you.

You can access/start using Eye Candy by either of two ways. The first access point for Eye Candy is from the Filter (menu) as shown below where you can select either the Text & Selection option or the Textures options.

One of the limitations of using the Filter menu to access Eye Candy is that when you wish to do something to some text, the text must be rasterized before Eye Candy can use the text. Once the text is rasterized, it cannot be altered. However, If you have Photoshop CS3 or CS4, you can convert your text layer into a Smart Object before applying any Eye Candy Filter. Text as Smart Objects not only do not need to be rasterized before filter processing, you can access the original text at any time. [Note: the ability to take advantages of Smart Objects in new to version 6.] This means you can always go back and alter, adjust, or fine tune your Eye Candy settings as well as alter your text. [Note: if your new text is longer than the original text, you will need to increase the size of the Canvas. Otherwise, any letters that lie outside the original canvas will not exist after accepting the text change.] One other issue is that if you are using your text (or object) in a Smart Layer, be sure to turn off the option "Create Output in New Layer Above Current" because that becomes redundant and repetitive actions.

The two different sets of Filters (Text & Selections and Textures) are separated because they do work (mostly) on two different types of images. The first one, Text and Selections, can alter any object or selection in the image. [More on Textures a bit further down in the review.] Thus, if you have some text, which is always in it's own layer, EC6 can effect that. If you have any image in it's own layer, EC6 can effect that as well. Lastly, if you have any selected items in an image, EC6 will effect the selected item on the page. Thus, in my image of snow above, I used the Elliptical Marquee tool to select an oval region in below the text "Winterfresh." This let me have flames coming from snow as shown below. [I left the marching ants to show the region selected. I did not create a separate layer for this effect.]

When you select your image enhancement option, the Eye Candy window will come up with all of your options as shown below (click here, or on the image, to see this full-sized).

On the left are a plethora of presets and the controls that let you fine-tune the effect to your needs. The above image shows the presets for "Fire" (there are a total of about 1500 presets across the full Eye Candy collection) and in the image below you can see the controls for fine-tuning "Fire," one of the 30 effects. You can either click on each preset or, once you have one selected, you can move up or down by pressing the up or down arrows on your keyboard. One minor limitation I found is that the presets are contained in folders and you can only arrow key up or down until you get to a folder. To continue viewing other presets, you have to click on the arrowhead to the left of the folder to open. It would have been nice if they had either allowed for automatic folder opening when arrow-ing down, or included a little check box to open all of the folders (or close them) all at once.

In the lower left half below is a space for user settings where you can save any tweaks you've made on any of the presets so you can use them again. In addition, you can save these custom presets and send them to friends and/or co-workers.

On the right half of the image above, the flames are strangely cut in half. This was intentionally done by me so that I could demonstrate the "before" and "after" view on a left/right/half approach. If you look in the upper right section (above the image region), you can see a gray and white two-column square that lets you see your image with the effect on one side and without the effect on the other. There are a 9 of different permutations (all on, all off, top/bottom, left/right, diagonal, etc.) of what's shown and hid.

Once you've found a preset that's pretty close to what you are looking for, then you have the option to select the Basic tab to fine-tune your effect. What you see in the basic tab (and any other tabs at this point) are completely conditional on the specific effect you are working with. If you are confused about exactly what any of the sliders do, there are very good popup tool-tips available as you slide your mouse over the features.

The Adaptive and Fixed radio buttons are used to set how the effects are applied to the image. In the Adaptive mode, the size of the effect is based on a percent of the image's size. That way, if you are working on a very large or very small image, the size of the effect will be scaled different. The significance of the Fixed (which is based on pixels, not percent) is so that you can copy an effect from a high resolution image and place it in a low resolution image and the effected item will look proper.

On the bottom of this window is the Random Seed button. This lets you do a manipulative tweak to any random nature of the effect. Thus, if you don't like the way a flame is wrapping over part of the image, you can click on the Random Seed to get a different permutation of the flames. If you mentally note the number you see off to the right of the button, you can go back to a previous permutation. What is very much needed here is a "history" button of the last (say) 5 or 10 past clicks so that if there was a good one but you got greedy and wanted a better one but then decided to just go with the good one, you could more easily access the one you recently passed up.

As mentioned earlier, there are two different sections Eye Candy, the second section, Textures, actually seems a somewhat strange place to divide since many of the effects in this partition can perform the same potential results as Text & Selections. That is, if you have text, an object on a layer, or a section within a layer, the filter will effect those regions just as in the previous grouping. I gotta confess, I could not figure out the full distinction. [There are two exceptions to this, more on that in a moment.]

There's no doubt that some effects just look better as a texture across a wider section than the small confines of skinnier items such as text. So, for example, unless the text is very large and/or thick, things like Brick Wall and Marble do not work at all well--but they could work in a pinch.

Amongst all of the Text & Selections and Textures options, there are two that do seem to be in a class of their own, Super Star and Ripples. Both of these completely ignore (or mostly completely ignore) and text, selection, or object in a document or layer.

Below is the same snowy image I showed earlier with the Ripples filter across the entire image. [The specific option used is called Frosted Glass (but to me it looks more like the ripely glass you have between you and the Dentist's Secretary.)] It doesn't make a difference if you have Text, a selection, or a single object on a layer, it will always effect the entire image. The SuperStar is a different strange kind of artifact that will attach itself to an object (or text). The curious thing is that any creation made (this filter can also make gears and nebulous star-ish shapes) will be completely independent from the shape, colors, or previous texture of that object. If you do not have an object (e.g., an empty layer), the object will look the exact same. Below I had a simple rectangle and the star affixed itself to that rectangle.

Let me take this moment to also point out that these are bit-mapped images, not vector, and if you create things like the Super Star that have projections and/or stuff that extend past the border of an image, any part of the star that extends off the edge does not get created. Thus, if I had created that same star about 1/3 off the bottom of the page as opposed to the middle where it resides, the lower extensions of the star's rays would just be cut off if you moved the star up after creation. Other effects that have clouds, smoke, light rays, or any other extended creations will have the same abrupt edge. This is not a bad thing but it does deserve special comment so you are not caught off guard.

As long as I'm putting forth some side observations, let me also add that some filters completely use the color and/or colors of the original item/object. Others not so much. This makes sense on some items like wood or brick wall. Simply, brick walls are not going to be pink unless you intentionally change the preset in the custom region. Likewise, any original art will be lost if you select Wood. You will get pine grain and pine color or some other wood type. You will not get a face that has wood grain (there are ways to do that in Photoshop, but this is not what can be done directly within Eye Candy).

If you have Photoshop CS4, there is another option to access Eye Candy: the Eye Candy Panels. If you go to the Windows (menu) and drop down to Extensions you will find two new options: "Eye Candy 6" and "Eye Candy 6 Button Maker." [Note: if you are familiar with Adobe's Configurator, you can make your own Panels for Photoshop-CS4.]

This is very welcome as these Panels solve one of the nuisances mentioned earlier when working from the Filter menu and that's the tedium of going back and forth, dragging up and down the Filter menu as you select the various options. Besides eliminating the need to scroll up and down the Filter menu, there is an even better feature that makes it VERY desirable to use the Panels as opposed to accessing Eye Candy from the Filter menu. As mentioned earlier, if you have some text and select an Eye Candy effect, you will first be asked to rasterize your text before anything can be done with it. Panels however, make a rasterized copy of the text leaving your original text untouched. I have no clue as to why there is this difference but it exists. I really like the fact that by retaining the original text, it much easier to make alterations if the need arises.

The icon/buttons of each option do provide a quick reminder of what each filter does. [Like the names shown earlier, they are placed in alphabetical order.] If you are not sure which icon is what, there are pop-up text reminders for the actual names of each filter, although it would have been nice if the names were simply included. When you click on the Textures tab, that section of that Panel accordions up to hide the Text & Selection options and only shows the Texture Options. Also, as you can see, the Panels provide quick and easy access to the Help (PDF) manual and the Tutorials on the web (which are well done and well worth watching).

One other advantage of using Eye Candy 6 Panels is the 2nd provided Panel: a cute "Button Maker" as seen below. Despite the fact that it's features limited in range and depth it does show promise. [Note: access to the Button Maker is only available from PS-CS4.]

Using the Button Maker is a selection process: you first place some text in your document. Then, from the Button Maker you select one item from each of the four rows (Shape, Texture, Style, and Shadow). Thus, as shown above, I've clicked on the Oval shape, the Swirl texture, the "Apple button effect" style, and the "equally dispersed shadow" shadow. You can see the results below of two different button creations.

The controls on this feature are somewhat limited. Yes you do have a variety of permutations for each shape, texture, etc. What you see is what you will get. Your two bits of control are that you can vary the relative size of the button beyond the default size to cover the text. That is, at 0%, the text will butt against the width edges of the text and will be a bit larger than the vertical dimension of the text. At 100%, the vertical was about double the size of the 0% but only about 25% wider than the 0%. I also would have like a Random Seed option. I could make 10 buttons in a row and every once in a while I'd get a button that looked different than the next series, but most of the time each button was an exact copy of the previous button.

There is no mechanism provided to create any variations on the buttons to generate button for web use (over, hover, visited, etc.).

The one other option is that you can either have the text and button automatically merged after creation or you can have the text end up on a different layer. Ostensibly the reason for the latter is so you can make a button and copy the daylights out of it so that all subsequent buttons will be the exact same. That would make more sense if there was always a Random Seed built into the Merged Layer option. As it is, I find it very difficult to get variation in button textures.

As a last comment on the Button Maker, while the Eye Candy Tool Tips are very good throughout the program, for some reason, here they fall down. Rather than identify what each selection item is, Alien Skin only identifies that you are in the Style row or the Texture row, etc. I would have liked Alien Skin to formally identify each selection so one could say I want the oval with the swirl texture, etc.

In looking over the full plugin of Eye Candy, I have to reflect on one feature within Photoshop, the Filter Gallery. When you bring up the Filter Gallery from the Filter menu, you have the option to access all of the built-in artistic filters (within Photoshop) and combine, mix, match, redo, adjust, whatever you want to do within that world. Once you click the OK button though, what you've done is locked in and cannot be re-adjusted. However, if you are using Smart Objects (introduced in PS-CS3), one could save the layer as a Smart Object before running any filters, and then after clicking OK in the Filter Gallery, one could re-enter the Filter Gallery simply by double-clicking the Filter Gallery icon under the Smart Object and continue as if you had never left.

Eye Candy 6 doesn't have a Filter Gallery and could do well to add one. One of the features that was dropped from the previous version was the ability to change the specific filter effect without having to leave the filter environment. Currently, if you have selected Swirl and want to see what Marble could do for you, you need to cancel out of Eye Candy, and select Marble as you re-enter Eye Candy.

What you couldn't do with Eye Candy 5 (and still can't do in version 6) was to combine effects like you can in Photoshop's Filter Gallery. The reason for the need is that some of the filters can create depth to an item (e.g., Glass) while others add an effect (e.g., Fire). Thus, if you want depth and an effect, you have to run two separate processes. Unless you have Photoshop CS3 or 4, you do not have access to Smart Filters and you would loose the ability to go back and tweak as need be during the creation process. As good as Smart Objects are for this problem, you are still required to go back to restarting each permutation of Eye Candy you want/need. I would love a single environment to test, play, and experiment with multiple filters concurrently. That combined with Smart Objects of course.

When trying to grade Eye Candy 6, there are interesting challenges because the plugins inter-activity is changed depending on which Application you are using it within. The good news is that while the inter-activity changes the end results do not, and the results will be excellent. If you want to make creative and expressive alterations on text, objects, selections, or the images itself, Eye Candy 6 is the tops.

Nonetheless, it behooves me to reiterate the three different environments this one plugin can exist within:

Photoshop Elements 6, 8, Fireworks-CS4: This is the basic plugin with no extra dynamics from the application environment. By taking advantages in the Layers Panels of these applications, one can actively alter and combine EC effects and still maintain a copy of the original for alternate versions and approaches to the same item.

Photoshop-CS3: Here you have everything from before plus the significant benefit of Smart Objects which provide the ability to go back and adjust, alter, and fine-tune any effect even if you close the document and quit the application.

Photoshop-CS4: Here you have the value of Eye Candy, the benefits of Smart Objects, and the additional convenience of the Panels and access to the Button Maker.

The question is how does one rate a plugin where the environment that contains the plugin changes not only the ease of use, but access to features that are otherwise not available? Keep in mind that none of this is Alien Skin's fault. Smart Objects are part of Photoshop and they will work with ANY filter. The two Panels provided within Photoshop CS4 are made from Configurator and they are an option available to any anyone who wants to make a Panel. Thus, all they've done is to use the features available to them in these different applications. They would have been at fault if they had not used the features and advantages of the respective applicaiton environment. In other words, I completely agree with what they have done.

I very much like and appreciate the improvements in Eye Candy. I love the speed boost. I really really like the ability to take advantage of Smart Filters. I appreciate the greater number of presets and that the presets are contained in folders to make them more logically grouped. I like how one has significantly greater control on creating variations from those presets. I appreciate how the entire Eye Candy package is now placed within one shipping package (no need to purchase three separate packages to get the full product). Because I have Photoshop CS4 I appreciate the new Eye Candy Panels.

The one area where I would like some help on is the overall interface. I long for an environment like Photoshop's Filter Gallery to really ease access to the various filter types and create interactions that currently are rather clumsy to obtain.

Despite this issue of the UI, Eye Candy is a wonderful upgrade to an already great product.

___________ 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.