Eye Candy 5: Extra Textures for Photoshop

Ben Long

Alien Skin Software’s Eye Candy has long been a favored plug-in collection for Photoshop users of all types. Offering a valuable mish-mash of visual-effect plug-ins, Eye Candy has proven to be useful for Web designers, 3-D animators, and print professionals. However, because it offered a somewhat random collection of effects — some texture generators, a noise plug-in, as well as others — some users found themselves buying a number of plug-ins they didn’t need to get the effect they wanted.
With version 5, Alien Skin has changed its approach. Eye Candy now consists of three separate packages, each one following a particular theme. The first of these is Textures, a set of procedural texture generators that allow you to create seamlessly tiled textures of any size. (The other two collections, Nature and Impact, will be released next year.)
The Textures package offers a range of basic textures including Animal Fur, Bricks, Marble, Reptile Skin, and Wood. Alien Skin’s procedural textures have several advantages over stock photo textures. First, because they are algorithmically generated, you have a fine degree of control over what the final texture looks like. So, you can select custom brick and mortar textures for a brick wall, for example. Or define precisely how deep you want the mortar, and what pattern you want the bricks stacked in.
Procedural textures also score over photographic textures because they can be generated at any size and resolution. What’s more Eye Candy 5’s texture generators now work in 16-bit mode in Photoshop CS, to produce even better results.
Texture Controls
All of Alien Skin’s plug-ins are built around the same well-designed interface, a single dialog box that provides a large preview window and several tabs of controls (see Figure 1). The specific controls vary with each plug-in, of course, but you can easily assess what each slider and menu does without ever having to look at the package’s simple menu.

Figure 1: Eye Candy 5’s interface is mostly unchanged from previous versions (as well as other Alien Skin plug-ins), though there are some nice improvements such as context-sensitive help and Photoshop-like keyboard controls.

In most applications, too many parameters and controls can be confusing and intimidating. Alien Skin has struck just the right balance of parameters to give you a seemingly infinite range of customizability, without having to suffer through a complex list of obscure parameters.
Each texture includes a Seamless Tile option that lets you create a pattern that can be applied across any space. So, you can tile a simple texture across the background of a Web page, or use it as a seamless texture for a 3D model.
In addition to selecting color parameters using a simple color picker, many of Eye Candy’s filters can also pick up colors from your document, allowing you to create custom zebra fur, for example, that matches the color palette in the rest of your design.
As with any Photoshop filter, Eye Candy’s results are, by default, constrained to any selection you might have made. However, several of the filters, including Fur and Reptile Skin, have options that allow the filter to render extra detail outside of the selection, letting you create fur or skin that appears to hang off of your selected area (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: As with any filter, Alien Skin textures can be constrained to a selection. An additional option lets you allow the filter to spill effects outside of the selection to create fur and skin effects that look three-dimensional.

What’s Changed
The Eye Candy 5 collection is an upgrade from the previous Eye Candy 4000, and many of the plug-ins carry over directly from that package. Though the $49-upgrade price is reasonable, if you only use a few Eye Candy 4000 filters and you’re satisfied with the results, few changes may not be worth the upgrade.
The program’s interface has seen a few improvements over the previous version, including more convenient access for saving and loading pre-defined settings; a new on-line help system; unlimited Undo, and context-sensitive help pop-ups over each control. Eye Candy 5 also packs a tremendous number of pre-defined settings for each filter, giving you an instant collection of textures, each of which can be further refined with your own customizations.
We were very impressed with Eye Candy’s results and the program is very well thought-out. However, given that the textures are procedurally generated, we were a little disappointed that the program can’t do more. We’d like to see the ability to add our own bump or displacement maps using an alpha channel or existing image data. Or to render textures along a path – complete with texture shapes that rotate to follow the curve of a path. The ability to bevel a texture at the time of creation would be nice, saving the time and process of an additional beveling filter.
However, for basic texture making, Alien Skin is a good collection that should keep you overflowing with fur, bricks, and lizard skin for quite a while.