Price: $129.00 (special upgrade pricing available at website)
Contact Info: http://www.alienskin.com/
Genre: Special effects graphics filters
Requirements: PowerPC processor, Mac OS 7.5 or later, 32 MB of physical RAM, Monitor with thousands of colors, one of the following graphics programs: Adobe Photoshop 3.04 or later, Adobe ImageReady 1.0, Corel Photo-Paint 8, Deneba Canvas 6, Macromedia Fireworks 2.0, MicroFrontier ColorIt! 4, MicroFrontier Digital Darkroom 1.2, MicroFrontier Enhance 4.01
 
Is It The End For Lame Graphics?
From the makers of the revolutionary (well, at least they changed my life!) Eye Candy family of graphics filters comes Xenofex, a whole new package of special effects, all of which promise to inspire and energize any graphics project. For the most part, Alien Skin Software delivers on these promises. Anyone can start out with a simple scanned image, chunk of text, or original artwork, apply one or more of the Xenofex filters, and end up with great results, the likes of which used to be beyond the ability of mere mortals. For anyone who regularly creates images, filters are an important tool in their bag of optical tricks. Alien Skin Software sure isn't the only company in the filter market, but there are a bevy of reasons why I take notice of their new releases. Let me tell you why a Xenofex review is worth your attention.
  First off, Xenofex is compatible with just
about every major graphics program on
the shelf today. I successfully tested
Xenofex on Adobe Photoshop 5.0 and
Adobe ImageReady 1.0. Secondly,
Xenofex's learning curve is very
short. For every individual filter, there
are well-labeled adjustment sliders, an
auto preview to assist you in
customizing the look of each filter as it is applied to your artwork, and a zoom feature lets you get a close-up (up to 1600%) of your work. One can also save settings within any filter for later use. Another advantage to Xenofex is that each filter comes prepackaged with approximately 15 variations (also called presets in this article) on each of its 16 filters.
Overall, the special effects included with Xenofex can be divided into three categories: Natural Phenomena, Distorted Effects, and Simulated Reality. In order to best demonstrate the filters, I've chosen to make my SUV (it's a Toyota stock photo and not my accessoried-out RAV) and my cat famous in the following presentation. Performing basic filter operations on simple objects, I am able to give an objective analysis of each filter. Performance may vary depending on the source image being "filtered." Sit back and enjoy the ride.
 
Natural Phenomena
The filters in this section are definitely my favorite of the Xenofex package. Not only are they fun to use, but resulting images are realistic and of a very high quality.
Lightning
Woohoo! This filter rocks! It's the one I've been waiting 
for all of my life. Lightning works by applying its magic
within and throughout any selection or layer that you
inflict the filter upon. Filter parameters include color,
segment length, glow width, jaggedness, meandering, and branching. The effects are easy to control and the results look oh so good!
Electrify
  Electrify is similar to Lightning except that waves of electricity
shoot out from your selection instead of being bounded by your
selection. To create the look of my evil kitty picture, I selected
the outline of Diva's eyeballs, and implemented a different
preset of the filter on each socket. I was able to control color, branching, length of electricity, and internal masking, just to name a few of the filter's parameters. Electrify, in combination with Lightning, are major selling points of this filter package, because there are no bounds to the fun you can have playing with electricity.
Little Fluffy Clouds
It's fun to make clouds of mustard gas and other noxious 
elements, as well as simulating good ol' fog and cumulus
clouds with this useful filter. You can alter the thickness,
color, and coverage of your clouds in ways that your local
weatherman can only dream of.
Constellation
  If you are looking for a trippy filter, look no further than
Constellation, which copies the look of various stellar
phenomena. Try this filter over any of the Mac OS pre-installed
Desktop pictures (OS 8 and above) and your eyes will be
rewarded for sure. A colleague pointed out however that this
filter is eerily similar to Photoshop's built-in filter, Pointellize,
although the interface is very different. In the example, I used a rather large "star size," but you can alternately choose a smaller size which gives your images more of a starry night type of appearance.
Baked Earth
This was the first Xenofex filter to really catch my eye. 
Parched landscapes, cracked paint, scaly skin, and beds
of gravel are just a few of the variations that are
included in the presets of Baked Earth. Incredibly inspiring, Baked Earth can be used for anything from web page patterns to creating digital masterpiece landscapes. To make the example above, I simply applied the filter to a block of color in Photoshop.
 
Distorted Effects
This family of effects will warp your images with shadows, highlights, and corrosive elements. They are definitely more artistic than playful when compared to the prior section.
Crumple
  Ever desire that crumpled up and rolled out again, piece
of paper look? If so, then this filter is for you. It's an effect
that can be used in an incredible number of applications
and that adds a nice texture to previously flat images. My favorite effects from among the presets for this filter are Stucco Wall, Wax Paper, Carbon Paper, and Melted Plastic.
Distress
Distress is a great filter for creating torn or altered edges around an  
object or image. Edges can be wavy and smooth, as in my example,
or jagged and corroded. Speaking of corrosion, one could easily
use this feature to create the steps of an animation in which the
object is slowly weathered away. Artists will enjoy fiddling with
the edge width, type, and irregularity within the Distress filter.
Origami
  I love filters like this. Taking a basic ordinary photo and
altering it into a unique piece of art is simple with the
Origami filter. The technique used here is to cut up the
image into tiny triangles and displace each triangle with its neighbor triangles. Origami works just as well with landscapes as it does with small objects. I can tell already that this filter is destined to become one of my favorites.
Shatter
The Shatter filter recreates the image that would be apparent if  
the source file was being reflected into a broken mirror. Users
can choose the number of shards, the relative displacement of
those shards, and the number of random seeds within the
filter's interface. I would appreciate this filter more if the
surface of the resulting images had more of a reflective
appearance, just like a real broken mirror. Shatter looks great on large images and backgrounds.
Shower Door
  An interesting version of the RAV4, don't you think? Shower
Door distorts source images out of complete recognition, which
isn't always a bad thing. Everything from a impressionistic,
Monet-like version of the selected object to a collage-like mess
is possible depending on the position of the dot size and
random seed sliders within the filter.What I don't like about this filter however, is that the results are often similar to some of the presets in the Origami filter I spoke of earlier.
Television
Using the Televison filter, you can create effects that  
mimic differing levels of television interference. The
example at right illustrates the "Snowy Picture" preset.
Other presets imitate a 70s TV set, a Times Square
Jumbotron, double vision etc. Although, this filter is
highly useful and generates nice results on a variety of original images, I was disappointed that there was not a black and white snowy picture setting. In order to simulate a black and white snowy picture, I had to set the image to Grayscale in Photoshop so that the filter was forced to generate black and white results and not color. A nice feature however, is how a rectangular images is warped into a TV shape as seen here.
 
Simulated Reality
Back to the fun and games! I just know that I'll be using these special effects on a lot of the web graphics that I make from now on.
Flag
  3-D-like banners and flags are yours for the making with
this filter; all without any messy 3-D rendering programs.
Xenofex's Flag filter turns any selection into an object
that has the appearance of fabric or vinyl being manipulated by wind and other forces. (I created the flagpole separately in this example.) It can also give landscapes a sort of vortexed look. The filter's variables consist of light, brightness, sharpness, ripple strength, and ripple thickness. Logos look great with this Xenofex effect.
Stain
This filter creates various shapes and sizes of simulated spills,  
stains, splatters, and even mildew. Xenofex uses the parameters
of internal opacity, irregularity, and edge width to change the
look of each stain; the size being determined by the area selected
prior to applying the filter, or by the size/shape of the object that
resides in the layer being affected. Ease of use and authenticity of results make this a fun to use and inspiring filter.
Puzzle
  Original and creative, Xenofex's puzzle filter divides your
selection into pre-formed puzzle-like segments and gives you
control over the amount of puzzle pieces, bevel width,
brightness and sharpness. In addition to the puzzle appearance,
the variables can be arranged to create a "needlework" sort of
pattern. Too bad, you can't automatically break apart the puzzle,
though!
Stamper
Stamper has the potential to be a really neat filter, but it is  
hard to demonstrate with little space. Basically, it takes a
source image of your choice and tiles it across a selected area.
In my example, my RAV4 was tiled four times. I then used
the "fade Stamper" option to fade my source image (the big RAV) back into the picture. The result is bleh. This filter works much better on huge images or lanscapes, where it becomes obvious that the tiling implemented by the filter is shadowing the larger source image. Its kind of like a mosaic, where the little pieces are repeated to make up a larger image. The learning curve on this filter is longer than the rest of the items in this package, and your source/pattern image is restricted to either TIFF files or your original image.
Rounded Rectangle
  Web artistes everywhere will find endless uses for this basic
filter. Rounded Rectangle draws a border around your target
layer, object, or selection according to thickness and corner
radius, color, and other choices. Both the indigo and blue borders in my demonstration were generated with this filter. You can also fill in the center of your rectangles to make web buttons and solid, yet beveled shapes. My verdict? This filter is clean, simple and necessary.
 
Will Xenofex Be Your FX?
All in all, Xenofex includes some filters that are better for small objects and text, and some effects that are better suited to larger, more expansive images and backgrounds. I guess that makes the product well-rounded. They do provide a good creative launch point for a designer's artwork, although they lack the variety that Alien Skin's Eye Candy set of filters can claim, and the cost is just about right for a product of this caliber. For anyone that already uses Eye Candy, Xenofex definitely completes that purchase. New users may want to compare this offering with Eye Candy and pick according to their taste. Alien Skin Software is my filter company of choice for graphics newbies and pros, however, so you need not look any further than http://www.alienskin.com/ for turning your wacked-out visions into reality!
