What is Alien Skin Black Box 2.0?

Version 2.0 of Alien Skin's Black Box offers four all-new special effects, a preview window, and user-defined settings. Applying motion blurs and swirls, or bevel, cutout, and glass effects to selections — including those within Photoshop layers — has never been easier.

Black Box’s spiffed-up 3-D interface includes a panning preview window and a list of preconfigured settings (with descriptive names like Scooped Out, Ugly Ridges, and Very Smooth). You can also create your own settings and save them.

You can apply all your filters to Photoshop layers, and you can merge their effects at various levels of transparency by using Black Box’s opacity slider. Although you can undo all filters, several deselect the current selection after they’ve been applied; if you haven’t saved the selection, you’ve lost it.

Version 2.0 has ten filters. Four create an adjustable-width bevel that appears to be sunk into the surface of an image (Inner Bevel), raised above it (Outer Bevel), roughly carved into a selection (Carve), or coated with a shiny raised layer (Glass).

The new Cutout filter removes the selected area and turns it into a feathered shadow that can he seen under the area that was removed, much as Drop Shadow adds a soft silhouette behind a selection. Both allow you to specify opacity, shadow color, amount of blur, and x and y offsets.

Motion Trail smears the selection in one direction, as if the object were photographed while moving rapidly. The blur direction is selectable from a rotating wheel, and sliders control the length and opacity of the smear effect. HSB Noise adds random texture to RGB images using subtle variations of hue, saturation, and brightness.

Swirl remains the coolest filter in Black Box, creating unique and outrageous effects, but it shipped with version 1.0. Version 2.0’s new filters — Inner Bevel, Carve, Cutout, and Motion Trail — are useful, but not as much fun.

While some of Black Box’s effects — such as Drop Shadow and Glow (which adds a neon backlight to your selection) — can be achieved using Photoshop commands. Black Box’s filters allow you to experiment with two or three variations in about the time it would take to select, feather, and add blur to a manually created drop shadow.

Though accelerated for Power Macintoshes, Black Box remains slow on 680X0 Macs. On a Quadra 650 with 24MB of RAM (16MB of it set aside for Photoshop), it took 10 to 15 seconds to preview most effects, and it can take up to a minute to apply them to moderate-size selections.

The Last Word While many of Black Box’s effects may seem to be just variations on a theme, they’re all useful and worth the modest price.

Busch, David D. (November 1995). Black Box 2.0. Macworld. (pg. 87).

Download Alien Skin Black Box 2.0 for Mac

Architecture

68K + PPC (FAT)

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II