Eye Candy 6

64 bit interface for Eye Candy 6

and sample chrome effect to eye.

Alien Skin has come out with it's latest update in the quality line of plugins for Photoshop with Eye Candy 6. For those of you who have previous versions of Eye Candy (4 or 5 in particular) you may want to uninstall them before putting on this new set as a lot of the effects are repeats. The biggest updates to the newer version comes with it's 64 bit support for Adobe Photoshop CS4, allowing you to have an interface on youur main work area rather than clicking on the list of effects from a dropdown. For me this is no large convenience as the Photoshop work area is already littered with a variety of pull down menus and I value the space to view my actual work more than the little knobs and dials to adjust. One great improvement they made was it's ability to handle large images and scale the effect adaptively, a setback in earlier versions. As with versions 4 and 5, ye Candy 6 has the capability to place the effect in a separate layer (big benefit), offers a variety of presets as well as the ability to store your own effects for recall (BIG benefit when working on client files that you need to reproduce an effect for) and one more big change, the ability to apply the effect in CMYK mode. I don't know how many times I've tried to apply an effect/filter in Photoshop only to see the list of nice warps and filters grayed out until I convert the image to RGB, back to CMYK, and then you lose true color reproduction from there. My vote is to have one of these plugin packages, whether 4,5 or 6 (and 3 is a keeper as well-I do wish they would continue lines specifically for After Effects) as part of your Photoshop arsenal. If you go to the Alienskin website they have a demo version you can download and try before you buy, as well as demo versions of their other fine plugins (Blow Up 2, Bokeh, Exposure 2, Image Doctor 2, Snap Art 2 and Xenofex 2).