A good Photoshop effects plug-in must be a real time-saver in a production workflow environment. It must produce eye-catching effects with a few clicks and output them in formats suitable for web, video and print. Alien Skin's Eye Candy 6 provides the workflow speed along with a great deal of variety, flexibility and ease of use.

The downloadable plug-in was simple to install, and after watching a couple of Alien Skin's tutorial videos, I found Eye Candy 6 to be relatively intuitive in adjusting its various effects. If you are familiar with the Photoshop environment, the learning curve for Eye Candy 6 is very small. Be warned, however, that once you start experimenting with the Eye Candy 6 library of effects, you may burn several hours before you come up for air.

I started with a simple black & white, rasterized  logo. I began by separating the text  from the logotype to put them on different layers since the thickness of the elements can sometimes be a problem when applying effects to text.

I began with a ubiquitous chrome effect just to see how the plug-in flexed its muscles. This image shows the Eye Candy 6 environment and the default chrome effect it applies. In the upper left part of the screen there are a slew of different bevels, thicknesses, texture maps and image maps to choose from, all of which are fully adjustable.

After clicking "OK" to accept the effect, Eye Candy creates a new Photoshop layer with the effect applied. This allows you to go back to your original unaffected layer and add another effects layer if needed.

Here I applied a default flame effect to the logo. Again, there are several types of flames to choose from with multiple adjustments for flame width, height, brightness, and color.  Notice in the layers palette there is now a new layer with the fire effect.

This next effect resides in the background effects window, but I couldn't resist applying it to the logo instead. My daughter calls it "Muppet Fur."  I applied a leopard fur pattern then changed the colors to pink and orange as seen here in the Eye Candy effects window.

As you can see in this window, everything is adjustable including the length of the hair, stiffness and swirlyness. (Is that a word?)

As with any effect, restraint can be a problem. Just because you can apply a fancy effect, doesn't mean you should. Eye Candy 6 will definitely test your resolve to this mantra. To illustrate this point, here is the logo with all of the effects layers activated. As you can see, unless you have a need for a chrome muppet that's on fire, be sure to have fresh batteries in your "good taste alarm" when activating this plug-in.  :-)

Pros:

Intuitive interface controls; excellent adjustability of effects; loads of presets; creates a new layer for each effect; can save your own custom adjustments as presets.

Cons:

Text and vector shapes must be rasterized before applying effects; on the pricy side compared to other Photoshop plug-ins.