Product Reviews

This is the first upgrade to the popular plug-in set for three years, and maker Alien Skin Software has taken the unusual step of releasing it first as a freely available public beta, which can be downloaded from the company's Web site (the beta will cease to function after 31 October). The beta release includes 13 of the 23 filters that will finally make up the set.

This release upgrades previous filters, giving them new levels of realism and functionality, and introduces several valuable new tools. Among the new effects is Chrome, which uses custom bevels and reflection maps to create truly convincing metallic effects in seconds. Other filters may offer a chrome effect, but this is by far the easiest to use, with settings for bevel width and height, ripple thickness and width, editable bevel profiles and simple lighting controls. It also produces the most realistic metal of any similar plug-in, and is reason enough in itself to buy the filter set.

The Fur filter, under-powered in version 3.0, is now greatly improved, with the ability to create real-looking hair, grass and, of course, fur around any selection. Unlike the KPT6 fur filter, however, this one only grows hair in a single direction. But it's far easier to use, and more reliable in execution.

The unique Smoke filter has also been completely reworked to produce far more naturalistic smoke effects, and now includes colour gradients that make it even more convincing. Coupled with the Fire filter (not active in the beta release), these will quickly prove both useful and popular.

The Water Drop filter still produces the round, randomly sized drops as it did in version 3.0, but there's now an option to disable the roundness, producing instead the effect of liquid

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spilt on a surface. The ability to vary the drop size, amount of coverage, colour, refraction, opacity and lighting make this work particularly well.

HSB Noise works like a combination of Gaussian Noise, Gaussian Blur and Photoshop's Clouds filter. It can be used to create subtle, painterly backgrounds; using the fractal settings adds a more textural feel. For creating more specific textures, the Marble filter gives users control over vein size, coverage, roughness and thickness, as well at the ability to set different vein and 'bedrock' colours.

Among the other filters in the beta version are Squint, which creates multiple blurred offsets of an image to give a hazy, drunken effect; Jiggle distorts an image as if seen through rippled glass; and Shadowlab makes it easy to create custom shadows using perspective distortion and perspective fade. Still to come are Wood, Drip, Fire, Melt, Motion Trail and several others, which promise effects and techniques not otherwise available.

The quirky interface of version 3.0 has been replaced by a simple, streamlined and tabbed dialog window that's more in keeping with the rest of Photoshop and, so far, less distracting. Among the many interface enhancements are unlimited undo and redo; a bevel profile editor, which allows you to draw your own bevels for those filters that support them; a colour gradient editor; and seamless tiling for creating textures.

Most significantly, Eye Candy now uses 'real world absolute parameter units', which is a roundabout way of saying that if you apply a filter to a low-resolution illustration at 72dpi, the effect will look the same when it's later applied at 300dpi. This makes rendering quick test images faster and more reliable, and is a big improvement in a filter set that was previously notoriously slow to render its results.

A menu bar, which appears outside the dialog window, gives access to presets and allows users to switch between the plug-ins in the set on the fly. Choosing your own presets from a menu is still far easier than searching for them within the dialog window, and this move is to be applauded. With its combination of simulating natural effects and creating complex distortions, Eye Candy 4000 - on the evidence of this beta alone - looks set to become an essential tool for the Photoshop illustrator.