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Eye Candy 5: Impact
There’s a new version of Alien Skin’s Eye Candy Photoshop plug-in. This one, called Eye Candy 5: Impact ($99), takes effects filters from the previous version (Eye Candy 4000) and adds several new filters. Three filters are new:
- Backlight, which projects dramatic light beam and spotlight effects from behind an object, with variable intensity.
- Brushed Metal, which simulates textured metal surfaces, such as brushed aluminum and polished brass.
- Extrude, which adds thickness and perspective to 2D objects.
New filters include (from left to right) Brushed Metal, Backlight, and Extrude.
Seven existing filters were improved:
- Bevel, which carves and embosses, for buttons and text with custom bevel shapes and surface textures.
- Chrome, which simulates chrome, liquid metal, and other shiny surfaces.
- Glass, which renders a colorful, gel layer over selections and makes great translucent buttons.
- Gradient Glow, which creates soft glows or hard outlines around any selection, using a single color or complex gradient.
- Motion Trail, which creates the illusion of rapid movement, even in a curved line.
- Perspective Shadow, which creates drop, perspective, and cast shadows.
- Super Star, which generates stars, flowers, and gears.
The improvements include support for 16-bit files and CMYK mode, presets you can save and share with others, and the ability to save effects to a separate layer.
Impact is the third of three Eye Candy 5 collections, which also include Textures and Nature. Together, they form a complete upgrade to Eye Candy 4000.
75 Professional Photographic Filters
Nik Multimedia’s nik Color Efex Pro 2.0 adds 75 professional-quality photographic filters to Photoshop. You can “paint” the filters onto your image with variable strength, using a Wacom pressure-sensitive pen and tablet. The basic filters let you apply traditional color lens effects to enhance skin tones, skies, and foliage, all without damaging the rest of the photograph. The Sunshine filter transforms the dull colors in a picture taken on a cloudy day into colors you’d see on a bright summer day. Other filters include B/W Conversion, Classical Soft Focus, Vignette, Darken/Lighten Center, Fog, Remove Color Cast, Polarize, Silver and Gold Reflectors, and White Neutralizer. The Stylizing filters include artistic effects such as Indian Summer, Midnight, Monday Morning, Old Photo, Pastel, and Solarization. It’s available in collections from $80 to $230.
Add Complex Light to Photoshop Images
Digital Film Tools’ Light! ($50) is a plug-in for Photoshop that lets you add effects to images to simulate the light cast by a patterned light source, such as a paned window, sun through leaves, abstract patterns, etc. The result is a realistic pattern of light and shadows that follow the contours of objects in the photo. You can also add realistic mist, fog, and glows in RGB, CMYK, and grayscale modes.
The Light! plug-in can be amazingly realistic.
CAD Tools in Illustrator
Hot Door CADTools 4 ($249) is a set of plug-ins for Illustrator 9, 10, or CS that assist with technical drawing. Its dimensioning tools add dimensional text and arrows to any line or angle, and the dimensions automatically update as the artwork changes. CADTools also provides tools for measuring and changing angles, areas of shapes, and radii of circles and Bezier curves. The Trim tool automatically trims excess from overlapping segments. The Fill and Chamfer tools let you automatically round or bevel a shape’s corners. The Wall tool creates two-sided wall shapes, and the Wall Healer tool cleans up the intersection of Wall shapes.
Once you use CADTools, you may wonder how you got along without it.
XPress Picture Manager
Badia Software’s BigPicture XT 2.0 ($90) is an XTension for QuarkXPress 4, 5, and 6 that lists all pictures in a project and shows all vital information about them (color model, format, file size, resolution, compression, scaling, angle, date modified, fonts, colors, etc.). BigPicture XT 2.0 also lets you select all pictures in a document that match a certain criteria (for example, all RGB images). Its interface shows image thumbnails and the location of each picture (in the document and on your hard drive). Just click a location to go there in the Finder. Edit a picture using any appropriate application and BigPicture recognizes changes as soon as you save the image. Should you rename a picture file while within BigPicture, BigPicture updates the link in QuarkXPress. You can search for missing pictures and have BigPicture automatically link to files it finds, update all modified pictures in one step, unlink all pictures, relink pictures in a different folder (great for swapping high-res and low-res pictures), and replace any picture with another while maintaining original transformations such as scaling and cropping.
Link a Database to QuarkXPress or InDesign
AutoPrice, from Meadows Information Systems, is available as either an XTension for QuarkXPress or a plug-in for InDesign. AutoPrice links text in a QuarkXPress or InDesign document to text in a database. Use it to automatically update prices or descriptions in catalogs, or create phone directories, timetables, and menus. The optional AutoPrice Exporter Pro can also export data from a QuarkXPress or InDesign document into a database file. AutoPrice costs $1,895 for the first user, then pricing varies.
Type-Fitting Tool for InDesign
Teacup Software’s TypeFitter 1.0 ($60) is a plug-in for InDesign or InCopy that fits text to a text frame. Rather than simply adjusting tracking or scaling, TypeFitter also adjusts word spacing and letter spacing for a more natural appearance. Its palette lets you find widows and oversets, and then click buttons to tighten, loosen or restore text. You can define settings for “tighten”, “tighten more”, “loosen”, and “loosen more”, and then copy these styles into other documents.
Print Names on Images in InDesign
Knowbody’s Label It ($50 per year) is a plug-in for InDesign that adds file name labels to placed graphics. You can locate labels on or near the image. When you move a picture, its label follows along. Labels can show full directory paths and also include details such as link status, modification date, and resolution. To create or remove the labels, you simply click a button on Label It’s palette.
Kerning and Tracking Editors for InDesign
Knowbody’s Cool Kerning ($99 per year) is a plug-in for InDesign that adds a feature similar to QuarkXPress’s Kern-Track Editor: It lets you define kerning values for any pair of characters in any font in a document. Because the kerning tables are stored inside the document, they travel with it. Knowbody has a similar plug-in, called Cool Tracking, to adjust the overall tracking of a font. Cool Tracking is also $99 per year.
This article courtesy of and copyrighted by Design Tools Monthly. For a free sample of the printed newsletter, email in**@**********ls.com.
This article was last modified on December 14, 2022
This article was first published on August 5, 2005
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