Eye Candy is a Photoshop plug-in From Alien Skin Software that is made for graphic designers to add that "wow" effect to their projects. It is a set of 30 Photoshop filters that give you the ability to render amazing special effects with very little effort compared to what you might have to do if you were to attempt these without the use of the plug-in. In many cases you couldn't even recreate them.
While these effects may have some usefulness within the realm of photography, they are really geared for graphic design tasks. That is, these effects would look great when applied to a title or logo, or used to facilitate website development for making buttons or banners.
With an easy-to-use interface, Eye Candy 6 makes it simple to create stunning effects with very little effort. To make it even easier, there are over 1500 presets that you can just point to and see your results. If the effect is not quite right, you can then make some adjustments until it looks good.
Once installed, Eye Candy can be accessed through a Photoshop CS4 panel. There is a Startup Panel and a Button Maker Panel. The button maker is, as its name implies, for the easy creation of buttons for Web effects, and the Startup Panel is for the text, selection, and texture items for creating your other effects.
As I said earlier, Eye Candy is primarily for graphic designers and Web designers who want to make logos, buttons, fancy text, and other things that will make their designs pop. To this end I took a two-dimensional star that was on a black background. The star and the background were on different layers so to isolate each one from the other.
I selected the layer with the star and then went to the launch panel. There are two areas in the launch panel. One is for the textures and the other is for the text and selections. I started out with the texture and selected the wood grain. This instantly applied the wood grain look and with a couple of changes on color and lighting I had the effect I wanted. I added some contour and beveling for effect.
Then selecting the original layer, I went in to the text and selection bar and chose the smoke filter, played with it for a couple minutes till I got the look. Again selecting the original layer did the same with the fire filter.
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