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This article is from February 1, 2010, and is no longer current.

Review: Eye Candy 6

The Textures category is mainly of interest to 3D artists, who need to create textures that will then be wrapped around 3D models. Because you can generate textures at any size, it’s often quicker to make a texture than to trawl the Web for one that’s large enough. The Textures category includes the following:
Animal Fur and Reptile Skin: The Fur filter generates furs of all kinds, including leopard skin and other mammalian coverings. Use it on an existing image to make furry computers or a hairy motorbike: any object can be made almost touchably fuzzy. Reptile Skin turns images into bubbly, glistening mosaics, as if a particularly adept chameleon had wandered in front of a photograph.
Figure 8. The Fur filter creates furry results from just about any selection.

Brick Wall and Stone Wall: Automatically generate bricks, tiles, breezeblock, and crazy paving effects. Although the results tend to look a little artificial in the flat, when wrapped around 3D surfaces they become far more convincing.
Brushed Metal and Diamond Plate: A pair of filters that create treated metal designs, from the circular brushed aluminum look seen on cafe tables to the diamond pattern on industrial flooring. As with all Eye Candy filters, you can precisely control the size, shape, height and spacing of the pattern.
Marble and Wood: The marble effect can produce an array of realistic surface types. The Wood filter is less convincing, producing the sort of pattern that covered 1970s plastic TV sets. The result is clearly artificial, but still of some interest.
Water Drops: From tiny bubbles to large, uneven spills, this filter is an easy way to create a variety of watery effects. You can set the amount of refraction and glisten on the water surface, producing a quick fix when you need liquid.
Ripples: Similar to Photoshop’s ZigZag filter, this makes pond ripples in which you can vary the size, number of ripples, height and so on. Producing a shiny surface and refracting the view seen through it, it’s far more powerful than ZigZag could ever hope to be.
Super Star: A bit of an oddity in the collection, this filter creates regular radial geometric forms and then adds colored fills and strokes to them. More a tool for the designer than the Photoshop artist, it’s a simple solution to an otherwise complex procedure.
Also in this category are Weave, which makes basket-type interwoven surfaces; Squint, which produces a shaky specular lens effect; Swirl, which creates swirling distortions; and Texture Noise, which combines the effect of Photoshop’s Clouds filter with custom coloring and size controls.
What’s New
All the Eye Candy filters have been speeded up, taking advantage of multi-core CPUs to produce their effects in a noticeably smaller time. The filters now all work with both 16-bit and CMYK images, which professional designers will appreciate.
In Eye Candy 6, all the presets have sensible, understandable names, and have been grouped into logical categories that makes the selection process that much easier.
Eye Candy filters are now capable of scaling their results to match the size of the selection they’re working on. This means that if you create an effect on a print-resolution logo, then want to scale it down to a tiny size for a Web version, the filter will intelligently scale all the effects to match the new size.
Three new panels work with Photoshop CS4. The first enables quick access to all the filters in the suite via visual icons that give an idea of the effect of each filter. The second panel is the Gallery Wrapper, which extends the edges of images so you can produce prints that wrap around canvas blocks. There’s also a new Button panel that turns text into Web buttons, with four preset styles for each of Shape, Texture, Style and Shadow. Unfortunately, the preset styles are poorly chosen and feel horribly outdated; this is very much a version 1 implementation of the idea, and it really should have waited until a few graphic designers had the chance to suggest a more attractive set of presets.
Well Worth It
Eye Candy is the sort of filter suite you’d buy for just one or two effects, and then find a whole range of others that suddenly become useful. If all you want to do is create gold lettering, for instance, there’s no quicker, more adaptable, or more convincing way of doing it: and it’s worth the price for the Chrome filter alone. When you factor in the ability to painlessly create a huge range of natural textures and effects, Eye Candy 6 becomes a compelling purchase.


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  • Anonymous says:

    Me parece fantastico este plugin. Gracias

  • Anonymous says:

    There are Palio some interesting points in time in this article but I don’t know if I see all of them center to heart. There is some validity but I will take hold opinion until I look into it further. Good article, thanks and we want more!

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