What is Alien Skin Textureshop?

Here I am, sitting at my Mac, applying oodles of mutations to Big Orange Bumps. An odd task, to be sure, but it’s all in a day’s work for a Macworld reviewer. I’m looking at Alien Skin Textureshop (AST), a program that generates patterns that designers can use as backgrounds, surface textures, or other graphic elements in printed or multimedia projects. The patterns that AST creates are seamless tiles, suitable for backgrounds of any size. Patterns can also be used as filters with image-editing programs such as Adobe Photoshop.

AST comes with dozens of prefab textures that run the gamut from wood and stone to reptilian scales to gelatinous goo. You choose a master texture, then adjust a slider to set the degree of “mutation,” or changes applied to the original pattern. The program generates 15 textures based on the master texture; you can save any of these you like, name them, and then apply further mutations if you wish. You can organize groups of textures into “bins,” which you open from the program’s main window.

Once you’ve created a promising mutation, you refine it by adjusting the color, direction, and reflectivity of light hitting the texture; since many of the textures look 3-D, with peaks and valleys, you can create interesting effects by experimenting with the lighting controls. You can also change a pattern’s tile size to increase or decrease a texture’s resolution. You may export AST patterns in PICT or CMYK TIFF format for printed documents, or PICT or RGB TIFF for multimedia projects.

Alien Skin Textureshop is easy to use, fun to play with, and a source of countless patterns. Certain personality types will enjoy AST; others may not. Control freaks should avoid it, since one is pretty much at the mercy of random mutations..., but this added control has a price: TextureScape costs about twice as much as AST.) Likewise, literalists looking for realistic natural textures would be better off buying a CD-ROM full of scanned textures, such as those from Artbeats... So who will find AST useful? People who don’t have the time, inclination, or artistic ability to create their own intricate and varied set of patterns.

The Last Word While Alien Skin Textureshop gives you little control over your creations, it does offer a graphics laboratory where experiments can mutate wildly, often producing visually interesting results. When it comes to making bizarre and beautiful patterns, there’s something to be said for pressing a button and letting a program do the work.

Fenton, Erfert. (July 1995). Alien Skin Textureshop 1.0. Macworld. (pg. 81).

Download Alien Skin Textureshop for Mac

Architecture

68K + PPC (FAT)

System Requirements

From Mac OS 7.0 up to Mac OS 9.2

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II