Alien Skin Eye Candy 7 This screen shot shows the two kinds of effects you can apply in Eye Candy 7 to a line of text or shape. Each icon has additional choices and controls. Bevel and Chrome seem to have the best features.
This example shows the flat bevel, but you can pick from a variety of profiles and even customize your own. This also shows a letter with a white highlight and black shadows, but you can assign a color for each.
Some of the Texture options are whimsical. For this fur option, I could control the color, pattern (this is Zebra), the length of the fur, and the direction it is blowing. I added the black outline using the FX “stroke” feature.
Eye Candy 7 has a lot of presets, like this Smooth Chrome effect. You can still modify any of the sliders on any preset. I added the thin black outline using the FX layer effects.
Some of Eye Candy’s textures can be applied to a solid shape or panel, or to letters. For the rocks, I could control the color, size of the rocks and thickness of the mortar.
Any of the textures in Eye Candy can be run through additional filters, like the Emboss - Smooth/Rounded filter I applied to the original Rock letter.
You can add outlines with the Stroke option in the FX Layer Effects at the lower left corner of the layer. In this example, I added a large black outline and a thinner white outline. All of the FX options will be available.
Photoshop Text Effects Once loaded, you’ll see a screen in the Layer
Styles that looks something like this screen shot. I loaded the Metal,
Wood and Fabric effects, but there are also Glass, Stone and many, many
more. Click on any of the small icons and it is immediately applied to the
current layer.
After picking one of the many Layer Styles, you can tweak any of the settings, such as making the shadow larger, or simply hit the Okay button to apply the style to anything on the layer.
Back in Photoshop, the Layer now has a new list of applied commands. You can double-click on the Effects line to edit all of the effects, or double-click on any of the effects in the list to edit just that one.
These effects take only a few seconds to render. While in Photoshop, the Text layer is fully editable allowing you to change the font size, spelling, font, kerning and so forth. Changes are applied dynamically. The designers at Photoshop Text Effects created over 5,000 effects. I can only show a few in this article, but check out their site for more examples.
Initially, you might think about applying these effects to only letters, but you can also apply them to a panel or shape. I believe there would be some size restrictions on the textures.
In the screen shot of the Layer panel, you can see the small Eye icons in the list of effects. You can turn off any of the effects at any time, which is what I did in this version of the previous example.
