Alien Skin Black Box 2.1 Alien Skin Black Box 2.1 Michael Hayman
The Black Box is a series of ten filters that are Adobe Photoshop compatible plug-ins. Some of these filters are indispensable for web masters. Visit any professional web site and you are sure to see graphics that make use of drop down shadows. Using The Black Box Drop Shadow plug-in makes a multiple step process a one step solution. Furthermore, when you use the plug-in, you maintain maximum control over the effect through sliders that adjust the offset, blur, opacity, and even the shadow color. Likewise to bevel the edges of an object you have over seven points of control over the effect, plus once you get it the way you want it, you can save your settings.
What's in the box?
Included plug-ins are Glow, Drop Shadow, Cutout, Inner Bevel, Outer Bevel, Carve, Motion Trail, Glass, Swirl, and HSB Noise. Swirl seems to be the chosen trademark of the Black Box. The price may seem a bit steep for only ten filters, with perhaps only three or four being filters you can not live without. However, if you are doing production work, the savings in time should more than make up for the cost.
Increased Functionality
With the 2.1 update, Alien Skin not only fixed some 2.0 bugs, but upgraded the compatibility of the 32 bit filters. These filters will work with Photoshop 3.05, Corel PhotoPaint 6.0, Micrografx Picture Publisher 6.0, and JASC's PaintShop Pro 3.12 and 4.0. Also, sometime in early '97, Black Box users can expect to get a discounted upgrade to Eye Candy, the successor to The Black Box. Eye Candy will have 20 filters, increasing the functionality of their old filters and adding ten new ones.
Requirements
Make sure you have 1.3 MB of disk space for the installation, although when running, the filters are efficient and fast. Image processing on our primary (Pentium Pro 200 with 64 MB RAM) machine ran lightning fast in both cases.
Summary
The bottom line is that these filters are very cool, very easy to use, and very much in use by web designers. What they do, they do exceedingly well.
