Snap Art 2 is a Photoshop-compatible plugin which can help you turn photographs into (apparently) ‘hand-drawn’ or ‘hand-painted’ artwork. We reviewed Snap Art 1 a couple of years ago. The recently released Snap Art 2 is essentially “the same but better”. The set of filters provided are the same as those in the original Snap Art but the user interface has been changed, some additional features have been added and the effects have been improved - in some cases, quite substantially.
Here’s an oil painting which I did earlier...
OK, so I cheated! My ‘painting; started out as this photograph. I just let Snap Art 2’s ‘oil’ filter do all the hard work
I could have drawn it in coloured pencils (above) just as easily. The Snap Art 2 Settings panel on the left lets me apply pre-designed settings or I can created my own settings to save for later.
This is how Alien Skin describes the changes: “Snap Art 2 renders artwork even more naturally than before. The techniques of human artists are carefully emulated, such as multiple layers of varying stroke size and enhancement of important edges from the original photo. Snap Art simulates details down to individual bristles on curved strokes and interaction between the brush and canvas texture.”
New features include oval ‘focus regions’ which let you select regions to be omitted from the full effects of a filter. This makes it possible, for example, to preserve tiny ‘sharp focus’ areas - say on an eye - while applying distortions or ‘brush strokes’ more strongly to the surrounding regions. Focus regions can be moved, shaped and resized. The degree of ‘feathering’ - the edge blur - and the intensity of the effect can be adjusted. You can add multiple regions to a single image.
Another new feature is filter ‘categories’. These are arranged on tabbed pages with groups of predefined and user-defined settings arranged on the branches of a tree on the first page. You can open a branch and click a setting to have it applied immediately. Other pages may include groups of specific types of parameter with radio buttons and sliders to fine-tune each effect - for instance, to alter the width of the theoretical ‘pen’ or the texture of the theoretical ‘canvas’ onto which an oil-painting is rendered..
The speed of rendering has also been boosted in this release and the performance is optimised for multiple processors. In principle, the filters can be applied to images of any size making it possible to work with exceptionally large pictures.
Snap Art 1 was a terrific set of artistic filters. Snap Art 2 is even better.
And here’s a pencil sketch filter applied to a photograph. Using the tabbed pages at the left I am able to alter parameters such as the density of the coverage, the length of the strokes and the texture of the virtual paper or canvas
Here the same photograph has been run through the ‘Stylize’ filter. A focus region has been applied to let me preserve greater detail in the puppies’ faces.
System Requirements: Windows/Mac. Windows version requires at least a Pentium 4 processor or compatible and Windows XP or later. Mac users must have a PowerPC G5 or Intel processor and Mac OS X 10.4.11 or later. For best performance on either platform, an Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 2 GB of RAM is recommended. A monitor with 1024x768 resolution or greater is required. Can be used with Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0.1 or later on Mac, Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 or later on Windows, Adobe Fireworks CS4, Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2.
For more examples of Snap Art 2 in use, refer to the Alien Skin Tutorials:
http://www.alienskin.com/snapart/snapart-tutorials.aspx.
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