Tag Archives: alien skin

Alien Skin Eye Candy 7 Adds Realistic (and not-so Realistic) Effects to Photoshop

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I’ve been using Alien Skin plug-ins with Photoshop for years, so it’s nice to know that the company behind these plug-ins continues to improve their tried-and-true Eye Candy package for those of you who want to embellish your images with cool effects.

alien skin examples

Original Tennis Ball Image via Shutterstock

The latest version, Eye Candy 7 improves on past generations, adding a new suite of lightning effects to its already impressive realistic fire, smoke and other filters. The plug-in installs easily on either Mac or PC and works with Adobe Photoshop CS5 or later or Photoshop Elements 10 or later.  It includes a wide variety of effects and textures, including chrome, animal fur, reptile skin, wood, clouds, snow, ice, metal, rust, and many others.

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It’s also deft at placing perspective drop-shadows behind objects – a significant improvement over the basic drop-shadow feature in Photoshop itself. When combined with the extrude filter, it can be used to create a fairly convincing illusion of 3D depth.

alien skin drop shadow

You can also use Eye Candy 7 to add curved motion trails to objects, which is really helpful for adding movement to static images.

alien skin motion fx

Original Airplane Image via Shutterstock

The interface itself is easy to use, offering quick access to numerous pre-built effects, but once you drill into a specific effect, sliders and a large library of presets let you have a tremendous amount of control over the appearance of your effect. You can also zoom in, view effects in split-screen mode with the original selection, and save presets.

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Keep in mind that Eye Candy 7 is really designed for applying effects to selected objects, shapes or text layers, not as embellishment to a flat, full scene. That said, you can easily select areas where you want to apply effects using Photoshop’s robust selection tools – and this gives you a much more fine-grained control over effects.

alien skin landscape

Original Snow Image via Shutterstock

Filters automatically preserve your original selection, and store the effect-enhanced image in a new layer. For those times that you want to fill an entire image, Eye Candy offers a nearly endless variety of texture-making tools which can be used on all, or a part of your images.

alien skin textures

While Eye Candy 7 definitely can be used to create realistic (or at least semi-realistic) effects and textures, the huge number of controls available for each one will have you experimenting and playing around for hours. For instance, I found that with the right settings, the Rust tool could actually be used to add moss to objects – and that the Electrify effect could be used to create blood vessels. The possibilities are pretty limitless, and this single plug-in adds a huge variety of capabilities in a single package.

Alien Skin Eye Candy 7 retails for $199.99(USD) over on their website. However, if you buy today (February 20th), Alien Skin is offering a 30% off discount on all of their software. Eye Candy is also available in a demo version if you’d like to try before you buy.

Alt Photo Adds Effects to iPhone Pics in a Jiffy

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Looking to make some stylized photos on your iPhone, but are bored with of Instagram’s effects? Well, look no further than Alt Photo, a cool little app from Alien Skin Software, the same guys behind some of the best photo effects plugins for Photoshop.

Alt Photo provides a really easy way to add film-like effects to your photographs, and is extremely well executed – especially for a free app. You start out by selecting an image from your existing photo library or snapping a new pic directly in the app.

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Then you simply hit the “Edit” button, and you’ll have access to a selection of 36 base photographic effects, ranging from vintage color and toy camera styles to black and white tintypes.alt photo 2

In the edit mode, you can swipe up, down, left or right to instantly preview your images with various effects applied, and similar effects are adjacent to one another – making navigation a breeze. The app also allows for quick image cropping to 1:1, 4:3 OR 3:4 proportions, as well as an unconstrained crop mode. Crops can then be combined with effects, and you can also adjust the intensity of the effect and brightness levels by tapping the appropriate control and dragging across the image.

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Once you’re satisfied with your image, you can quickly save it back to your Camera Roll (in full or cropped resolution) and share it with the world. Alt Photo has built-in integrations with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Flickr, as well as E-mail sharing – and with the press of one button, you can share to any or all of these methods.

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While Alt Photo doesn’t really cover a lot of ground that Instagram hasn’t already covered, I’m still impressed with this little app. It doesn’t aspire to be a full-fledged image editor like Photoshop, but there are already plenty of apps for that. It does everything you’d want a mobile app to do – it’s easy to use – and doesn’t try to go too deep. Best of all – it’s free. So what are you waiting for? Head on over to the iTunes App Store and download Alt Photo now.