Tom Arah looks at some recently released creative add-ons from Alien Skin and Twisting Pixels that could help make your work stand out

With all creative professionals using Adobe Photoshop it’s difficult to make your work stand out. The solution is to extend your creative arsenal by choosing from the wide selection of Photoshop plug-ins.

Over the years I’ve tried to help users keep on top of the wide range of add-ons available including longterm favourites such as Corel’s KPT Collection, Taka Umemura’s Virtual Painter and Andrew Buckle’s various GraphicXtras filters. The scene is constantly changing however and recently there have been a number of new additions from two veteran developers that are well worth knowing about.

Eye Candy 5

One of the best sources of Photoshop plug-in filters is Alien Skin which has been producing add-ons since 1994. Alien Skin set one of the first benchmarks for creative filters with its original BlackBox release which turned into the wide-ranging and eclectic Eye Candy 4000. Now that collection has gone too to be replaced by three new releases - Eye Candy 5: Impact, Eye Candy 5: Textures and Eye Candy 5: Nature ($99 each or $199 for all three) - each based on filters taken from the two earlier collections and now expanded to form more coherent themed sets.
In each case the filters work in the same way built around a large preview window to the right with a tabbed control panel to the left. The first Settings tab offers access to preset effects for each filter while additional tabs offer control over all the filter parameters. For many effects the level of control could prove intimidating with dozens of parameters on offer, but generally you can quickly hone in on an effect with the presets and further fine tuning is reasonably intuitive. Moreover, as many of the effects are built on a Random Seed element, once you’ve found an effect you like you can just click on this command to generate variations on a theme to choose from. When you’re happy with your selection you can apply the filter either directly to the image or, non-destructively to a new layer.
So what effects are available and how good are they? Eye Candy 5: Nature offers ten filters – Corona, Drip, Fire, Icicles, Ripples, Rust, Smoke, SnowDrift, Squint and Water Drops – designed to mimic natural phenomena (not quite sure what Squint’s camera shake and double vision are doing in here but never mind). The Corona and Ripple effects are particularly striking and effective and Eye Candy: Nature generally does a good job of creating immediately recognizable naturalistic effects. Trying to reproduce truly believable natural effects such as fire and smoke though is surprisingly difficult even in a 3D rendering package and whether you could call the end results completely convincing is debatable.
The same distinction is true of Eye Candy 5: Texture’s ten pattern-based effects – Animal Fur, Brick Wall, Diamond Plate, Marble, Fur, Reptile Skin (the filter with gave Alien Skin its name), Swirl, Texture Noise, Weave and Wood. With the Wall filter for example there’s no doubt that you are looking at a brick, concrete and stone wall complete with advanced control over elements such as mortar depth and colour variation. Compared to a dedicated procedural texture generator such as Texture Maker or Genetica Pro however the results still look decidedly artificial. On the other hand there’s no doubt that having the power immediately to hand within Photoshop is a major advantage. Moreover, for many projects it’s important to remember that you don’t need photorealism – say if you want to add an abstract swirling background to a boxout or want to apply a zebra effect to a title. In fact in many ways an element of artificiality to the effect can make it more arresting.

Alien Skin is an obvious choice to give your work instant impact

For maximum eye-catching power though Alien Skin wants you to turn to the ten filters in Eye Candy 5: Impact – Backlight, Bevel, Brushed Metal, Chrome, Extrude, Glass, Gradient Glow, Motion Trail, Perspective Shadow and Super Star. Many of these effects such as Bevel and Motion Trail date right back to Black Box and in the intervening years their excessive use has rendered the effect passé. Moreover nowadays, for many basic jobs such as adding shadows, glows and bevels, Photoshop’s layer effects could well offer all that you need and in a non-destructive environment. Having said this, each of the Impact filters offers considerably more power than their Photoshop equivalent – true perspective rather than simple drop shadows for example – and if used subtly they can really make your work stand out.

The Twisting Pixels layered approach lets you build up effects

PixelCreation Bundle

Another wide-ranging set of creative effects comes from another longstanding developer: Twisting Pixels. As with Alien Skin these filters offer full screen previews and tabbed control over filter parameters, but the Twisting Pixel filters offer some additional benefits. Firstly you don’t need to access the effects via Photoshop or another host editor as they can run as a standalone application. Even better, you can simultaneously apply multiple effects as layers which are then controlled with a layer palette down the right of the screen. By painting on these layers with the brush or eraser tool you can then control just where effects are applied and you can also save your combinations of layers and parameters as presets for future use. On the downside the unusual Twisting Pixels approach means that the filters can’t be applied non-destructively within Illustrator.
So what power is on offer? As with Alien Skin, Twisting Pixels has broken up its range into three separate themed sets. The first, PixelCreation ($99), is a collection of 12 filters for adding naturalistic elements to your images’ skies such as clouds, moons and stars along with another seven filters designed to fine-tune these elements such as a Luminescent Brush ideal for brightening areas of a milky way. Despite the many controlling parameters the various cloud types still tend to look artificial on real skies in existing photographs but PixelCreation comes into its own for creating believable and attractive night skies and space backgrounds.
The second set, PixelPaper ($99), could hardly be more different. It pulls out 15 filters designed to recreate paper-based effects. While some of these such as the Acid effect for adding blotches are unlikely to see much use, the various Crumple, Crinkle, Fold and Crease filters that work to give your image a 3D look are very simple and very effective – making your images stand out by literally giving them a lift. By comparison the ten effects in the PixelPack ($60) are a mixed bag ranging from Mosaic and Ceramic Tile through to Postage Stamp and Paper Stain. Compared to the main two themed sets these feel like random after thoughts but if you’re interested in either PixelCreation or PixelPaper you might well decide to spend a little extra to get the PixelCreation Bundle ($130) which offers all three sets and ten extra simple effects for good luck.

ArtStudioPro’s layered filters let you turn photos into works of art – with a bit of effort

ArtStudioPro

Alternatively you might be interested in Twisting Pixels new ArtStudioPro ($100). This uses the same interface and layer-based approach as the Pixel effects to turn your photos into real works of art. ArtStudioPro is designed to produce five main effects - Colored Pencil, Crayon, Marker, Technical Pen, and Watercolor. Select the Coloured Pencil filter for example and you can control factors such as brush size, length, angle and style. The latter is key to the overall effect – choose the Flowing style for example and the angle of the brush strokes automatically responds to the colour in the picture.
This is all well and good, but other filter sets such as Paint Alchemy offer similar control. Where ArtStudioPro proves different is in its layer-based approach. Add two Technical Pen filters for example and then change a couple of parameters and using the Brush and Eraser you can quickly paint on an attractive cross-hatch shading effect. And ArtStudioPro offers dozens of supporting filters for each of the five main effects – for example Technical Brush Outline lets you automatically pull out the main features of the image ready for shading while Restore Original allows you to paint back features from the original photo. Perhaps most important of all ArtStudioPro lets you add layers on which you can paint manually using the appropriate brush to give your image those all-important and unmistakable hand-drawn finishing touches.
The layer-based approach is the secret of ArtStudioPro’s success but it also proves its Achilles’ heel. To begin with, the multiple processing involved means that you really need a fast system if you’re not to get bogged down. Add to this the added complexity of trying to manage various interacting effects and the fact that updates sometimes don’t behave as you would predict and the process can become frustrating – especially so as the manual is too skimpy to be much use. Stick at it though and ArtStudioPro’s layered filter approach can certainly pay creative dividends.

Alien Skin’s Exposure gives digital camera images authentic film-based character

Exposure

After the clear creative and artistic potential offered by ArtStudioPro, Alien Skin’s Exposure ($199) might well look underwhelming and overpriced. That was certainly my initial reaction as Exposure offers just two main filters – Colour Film and Black and White Film. Moreover the functionality it offers will be very familiar with separate tabs for controlling Colour, Tone, Focus and Grain. These are all standard features and the first three lie at the very heart of Photoshop-based enhancing so what does Exposure bring to the party to justify its price?
Well to begin with, it brings productivity. Using the main Settings tab you can instantly click on dozens of presets to explore very different looks for your image. The majority of these presets are based on experiments with real world film stocks such as Fuji Provia and Kodak Ektachrome that Alien Skin has studied in minute detail to see exactly how they can best be reproduced. In each case this might involve combining an overall colour cast with different responsivity over the tonal curve, some differential saturation handling across colour channels, some sharpening and some added grain. Theoretically you could do this yourself with Photoshop’s tools but it would be laborious at best and most users wouldn’t know where to begin to try and create a particular look. Moreover trying to consistently apply the same effect to multiple images would be a nightmare, but with presets it’s simple and with Exposure’s Actions support you can even automatically batch process any number of images.

More importantly Exposure isn’t just about productivity, it’s about creativity in its richest sense. This doesn’t necessarily mean making your images stand out by adding eye-catching bells and whistles – though Exposure does let you create cross-processing, aged film, infrared and duotone effects that certainly do meet this criteria. Instead Exposure’s real strength is its ability to create much more subtle effects - in particular its Grain handling is a revelation. Traditionally grain is added uniformly across an image as random coloured pixels but Alien Skin has recognized that this is completely artificial. Instead with Exposure film grain can be larger than a pixel and appears differently in different areas of an image – the highlights, midtones and shadows. In a way this visible grain is a flaw of traditional chemical-based film processing but by realistically recreating it Exposure restores a lot of the character and warmth to computer-based photography that digital cameras have lost.
Exposure is an example of Photoshop add-ons at their best: improving workflow, opening up new creative possibilities and producing high quality work that really stands out from the crowd.

PostScript: One of the things that struck me looking at this batch of effects is their value. It used to be common for Photoshop plug-ins to cost almost as much as their host. Nowadays, thanks to the economies of scale offered by the internet and the current exchange rate, you can often justify the cost of an entire collection even if you only plan on using a single filter. At that price, can you afford not to build your own add-on collection?