In addition
to the interface tweaks, most of the filters also gain a few
new features. All of them come with a set of presets. For
example, Fire has alternate color schemes for chemical fires,
natural fires, and other types. Most of the filters also gain
the ability to be applied as seamless tiles for creating backgrounds
for Web pages. As a whole, all of the filters gain a greater
degree of control.
The
filters
New filters in Eye Candy 4000 add a lot to this collection,
and some of the old filters pick up some nice tweaks and added
functionality. I'll touch on the major ones here.
Marble, of
course, creates marble textures, as well as not-so-marblish
textures that can be created by tweaking the settings. There
are setting for vein size, vein thickness, coverage and roughness,
as well as user-definable colors for the bedrock and vein. (These
color can be set through the color picker or via an eyedropper
tool.) The marble effect is convincing, and it can be set to
produce seamless tiles.
The
filter Melt is another new addition to the collection. It's a
fairly simple effect but one that, for the life of me, I can't
remember seeing in any other collection. This particular one has
controls for the melt ripple width and stretch length, as well
as the degree of pooling, which gathers up the melted particles
at the bottom of the effect.
The
Drip filter is probably my favorite new filter. The effect is
a simple one—namely making an image looking like it's dripping—but
it's a fairly fundamental one lacking in other packages. It includes
controls for width, maximum length, spacing, taper and dribble,
as well as a number of lighting effects, from directionality to
highlight brightness.
Corona
is similar to a simple glow, but it adds flares that resemble
spikes in some other filters. Controls include glow width, flare
size, stretch, waver, blur and opacity. You can set the effect
to draw over the selection or only outside it and to radiate from
the selection.
Finally,
there's wood, which, of all things, creates wood effects. This
one has the most controls of any of the new filters—pulp
color, rings, roughness, grain, knots, etc. You'll be unimpressed
with the factory defaults, but use some of the presets, and you'll
be able to achieve some nice results with just a little work.
Some
of the old filters also gain some good updates. Smoke, for instance,
sees some serious improvements in this version. Aside from the
revised filter's ability to create more photorealistic smoke effects,
it can also produce much more variety, especially with the addition
of side taper, which, as in the examples below, lets the smoke
waft to the left or right of your object. One thing that makes
the Smoke filter particularly versatile is the addition of a gradient
slider, which allows you not only to edit colors, but also to
adjust the interactions between the colors in the gradient.
