Product Reviews

Splat! is a new suite of Photoshop-compatible plug-ins from Alien Skin Software, the maker of EyeCandy. It's a mixed bag of filters that offers a range of effects to enliven flat artwork.

The Frame filter adds custom frames to rectangular selections. Unlike simple bevelling filters, Frame uses real images such as wood to create perfect, realistic frames at any size. Each Frame file consists of a 3 x 3 grid that includes separate designs for the corners and edges, resulting in a seamless frame that looks like a photograph.

There are 27 different wood frames included, and there's also a range of geometric and special-effect frames to choose from, including leopard skin, masking tape and ink splatter.

The Resurface filter adds texture to flat artwork, providing the kind of effect that would normally be achieved using Photoshop's Lighting Effects filter with an extra Alpha channel. However, Resurface is far easier to use, providing a wide range of preset textures that can easily be resized and lit on the fly.

A useful innovation is the Distortion slider, which makes the artwork ripple as it follows the apparent contours of the surface texture, resulting in added realism. If the Concrete texture is applied to plain text on a coloured background, for instance, increasing the Distortion amount will make the lettering really look as if it's painted on the surface, complete with holes where the paint hasn't reached.

South of the border

Border Stamp takes files containing multiple images (.TUB files) and places them in random arrays around the edges of selections of any shape and size. As well as being able to vary the density, size and width of the border (negative values will make the stamp position outside the selection edges), you can also apply a drop shadow. This causes each object in the border to cast its shadow on the one beneath as well as on the background. The supplied border types include flowers and coins.

To complement

ADVERTISEMENT

the Border Stamp, there's the Fill Stamp. This fills with objects in the same way, from the inside out: so it's easy to make text out of coins, or fill any selection with randomly placed images. A useful addition is the Colorize option, which picks up the colour of the underyling image and applies it to the objects used for stamping. It's a quick way to make, for example, a version of the Mona Lisa made of coloured flowers.

The Edges filter roughens selection edges in six different ways, using halftone dots and lines, square pixels, rough or lumpy edges, and a convincing torn paper effect. Use it to turn type into a rough woodblock effect, or to create geometric patterns from any selection.

The Patchwork filter fills selections with Patchwork files, including light pegs, cross-stitch effects, tiles and even ASCII art. It's the kind of effect that's almost impossible to achieve in Photoshop alone: you can turn a string of text into an array of balls in seconds.

Splat!'s interface follows the same clean, intuitive model followed by the other Alien Skin plug-ins EyeCandy and Xenofex. The large preview window can be resized to fill the whole monitor, if you want it to. However, the larger the window, the longer it takes to generate each preview. As well as both sliders and numerical entry for variables, there's also a Randomise button that will change the random seed for each effect without altering the parameters.

Favourite combinations of sliders and patterns can be saved, and will appear directly in the menu list. A handy preset manager lets you rename or delete user setting at will.

You've been framed

What's really impressive, though, is the way Splat! lets you design your own image files. To create a Frame, for example, begin by making a new Photoshop document, and then divide it into nine squares. Design sides and corners and place them appropriately; then, when you choose Save As, you'll see two new options in the standard Photoshop dialog box for saving Splat! Frame and Border files.

Similarly, any greyscale JPEG image can be used as the basis for a bump map to be used in the Resurface filter. That said, you'd be hard pressed to tire of the 200Mb of images and textures supplied with the product.

Once again, Alien Skin has produced a set of real-world filters that are as innovative as they are unique. Where others concentrate on wacky special effects, Alien Skin continues to create must-have filter sets that combine a slick interface with true functionality. And Splat! is no exception.