SAMS Teach Yourself Adobe® Photoshop® CS2 in 24 Hours [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Figure 19.2. Alien Skin's Eye Candy, applying some fur to a selection.

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Figure 19.3. You might not use this every day, but it's fun.

Hour 24, "Photoshop for the Web.")

Splat!

Splat! is another fun plug-in from Alien Skin. It creates frames, edge treatments, background fills and textures, surface textures, and mosaics. Splat! comes with a very large collection of images: some abstract, some strange, some beautiful and useful. Although you might not want to frame your girlfriend's portrait with cereal or teeth (complete with roots), white roses are nice. There are also lovely Art Nouveau edges, licensed from Dover Fine Arts. Of course, you can add your own image stamps, too.

Be sure to check out Splat!'s texturizers. They are much more interesting than Photoshop's canvas and sandstone. The Splat! collection's interface, shown in Figure 19.5, is easy and intuitive.

As is true of any of these tools, the more you explore, the more you'll learn about working with it. Some filters can take quite a long time to apply, especially if you push density settings to their highest points (and this is true of both third-party and Photoshop-native filters). Don't assume that your system has frozen if you don't see any movement for as much as a minute. The math involved in remapping each pixel in a swirl effect would make Einstein choke. Be patient. The computer is thinking as fast as it can.

Xenofex 2

Yet another terrific set of plug-in tools from the Alien Skin folks, Xenofex 2 is the new version of a long-time favorite. Within its 14 effects are filters to shatter, stain, burn the edges, make a mosaic or jigsaw puzzle, or cover your picture with clouds or stars, or make it look like it's printed on crumpled paper, just to name a few. Figure 19.6 shows a picture of a hot varsity basketball game, as a jigsaw puzzle. You can, of course, vary the size of the pieces, and the complexity.