Eye Candy 
Software review by Susan Ives

 Eye Candy is a PhotoShop plugin. It requires Photoshop version 3.0 or 4.0, and will not work with the PhotoShop LE limited edition that comes bundled with some computers and scanners. The Only other graphics program compatible with Eye Candy is JASC's PaintShop Pro 4.12. It won't work with any other programs, even those that advertise compatibility with PhotoShop filters. 

I don't usually dwell on system requirements, but Eye Candy is a resource hog. My desktop 486DX4/100 with 16 MB RAM running Windows 3.1 is at the shallow end of the gene pool as far as Eye Candy is concerned. A Pentium, Windows 95 or NT and (get this) 32 MB of RAM is recommended. Eye Candy worked erratically on my desktop computer, eventually crashing PhotoShop by causing Win32S OLE errors. I tweaked everything, including installing a newer version of Win32S, to no avail. It works fine on my laptop, a Pentium 90 running Win95. 

Eye Candy automates procedures that turn PhotoShop users into homicidal maniacs. The recipe for making a drop shadow in PhotoShop for example, includes selecting an image, dragging a copy onto a new layer, changing the opacity, changing the color, applying a gaussian blur and wrestling the shadow into position. If you make a mistake, start over. I have tried to make drop shadows at least 100 times and have succeeded twice. Making a bevel is even worse; I tried once and had to take to my bed for the rest of the afternoon. 

 It took me less than a minute to create a beveled button with a drop shadow using Eye Candy. You want 50 of them? No sweat. 

 My favorite Eye Candy filter is drop shadow, which makes an image appear to float above the background. Using slider bars and pull-down menus, I can control the width of the shadow, its blur, opacity, and color. I can alter its direction. There are 10 pre-set variations, and Eye Candy remembers the last settings that I used and lets me replicate them. If I invent an especially pleasing configuration, I can give it a name and add it to the presets menu. I can preview the results and endlessly tweak them. Most of the Eye Candy filters follow this basic format. 

 A few Eye Candy filters are too weird for me. Take fur. Fur makes things hairy. You can have clumpy fur, short fur, long fur, straight fur or naturally curly fur. Thick fur or balding fur. Green fur and pink fur. Downy fur or shaggy fur. Shiny or dull fur. Fur is a dog. 

 Other losers are swirl, which imposes random whirlpools on the image, and weave, which makes the graphic appear to be woven on a placemat. HSB noise, adds random defects, like a drivers license that went through the washer in the back pocket of your jeans. Squint baffles me. It unfocusses your image, duplicating, according to the manual, bad vision. Greedy optometrists, hoping to foist bifocals on nervous baby boomers, probably invented Squint. Maybe if I studied art instead of political science in college I would be able to appreciate these effects. 

 The remaining 16 filters are to die for. 
 
 

• Antimatter inverts brightness without affecting hue and saturation. PhotoShop's Invert feature will turn dark yellow to light blue; Antimatter turns it pale yellow.

 

 

• Carve makes your selection appear to be chiseled into the background. 
• Chrome produces a metallic effect, in gold as well as silver.

 

 

• Cutout makes the selection appear to be a hole in the image.

 

 

• Fire makes it look like your image has flames leaping from it; Smoke adds wisps of smoke. The manual recommends adding smoke before fire, which makes sense to me.

 

 

• Glass puts a sheet of colored beveled glass on top of your selection You can mimic the rippled flaws that appear in older glass.

 

 

• Glow adds a neon glow around the edges of your selection, and can be used to create a radioactive effect or to make text jump out from a low-contrast background.

 

 

• Inner and Outer Bevel give your image an embossed look, inner bevel by adding highlights and shadows around the inside of your image and outer bevel on the outside. This is an easy way to create selection buttons.

 

 

• Jiggle makes things jiggly, by bubbling, warping and twisting. I haven't produced any appealing jiggles yet, but the illustrations in the manual are intriguing and I will keep experimenting.

 

 

• Motion Trail smears the selection outward in one direction, creating the illusion of motion. You can apply jiggle to a motion trail to create a gaseous vapor trail.

 

 

• Perspective Shadow creates a shadow behind your selection, making it look like it is standing on edge.

 

 

• Star creates stars and other regular polygons, with from 3 to 50 sides. To get a shape in PhotoShop, you typically import it from a program such as Corel Draw. Star makes it easy.

 

 

• Finally, Water Drops randomly places water drops on your image. I might try this on my garden this summer!

 PhotoShop itself is a $600 program, and is the professional standard for graphic imaging software. If you are committed enough to graphics to have sprung for PhotoShop, you owe it to yourself to add Eye Candy. It's one sweet program. 

 Eye Candy is produced by Alien Skin Software and is the successor to their popular Black Box program. It retails for $199. They can be reached at (919) 832-4124 or on the Internet at http://www.alienskin.com. 

 Susan Ives is the Webmaster of the Alamo PC home page.