For those who attended the first "Night Timers" meeting on Wednesday, January 20th, I showed a few of these filters from Alien Skin's Demo catalog and also told about a very good deal that Alien Skin is offering to user group members only. If you are not a member, you can become one for only $20.00 a year and still save money on this offer.

The offer is good for purchasing either Eye Candy 3.0 or Xenofex 1.0 for $99 each including a free copy of Jasc Paint Shop Pro 4.14. The other offer is for Eye Candy 3.1 for After Effects for $449. Obviously Paint Shop Pro does not come with Eye Candy 3.1. Both Eye Candy 3.0 and Xenofex 1.0 sell for a street price of about $120. Eye Candy for After Effects sells for $499. The latest edition of Paint Shop Pro is version 5 and it sells for about $90.

To purchase any of the above products, a TCS members should call 1-888-921-SKIN or email and identify yourself as a TCS member. These offers are not valid for purchases through Alien Skin's web site. However, it is a good place to look and find out more about the filters. The site address is http://www.alienskin.com.

System requirements for Xenofex are: a PowerPC Macintosh or a PC running windows 95, 98, or NT. The filter is compatible with Photoshop 3.0.4 or later, Paint Shop Pro 4.12 or later, PhotoPaint 7 Plus and PhotoPaint 8, Deneba canvas 6.01 and a number of other image editing host programs including Micrografx Picture Publisher 8 .

There are 16 filters in all with so many combinations possible created by means of the filter's interface that the number sky rockets. The filters are: Lightening, Television, Baked Earth, Stamper, Stain, Crumple, Puzzle, Little Fluffy Clouds, Electricity, Constellation, Distress, Shower door, Flag, Rounded Rectangle, and Shatter.

I have always really liked filters from Alien Skin and consider them an import part of my "tool box." Xenofex is no exception. These filters are easy to use, come with a really good manual, and have an extremely easy interface. I have included some scenes in black and white with this article. For more examples, see this article on the TCS web site of http://www.tcs.org the March I/O Port issue.

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