...and, for the sake of comparison, here’s the original photograph:
Alien Skin’s Snap Art is a collection of ten ‘natural art’ PhotoShop plugs-ins. If you are familiar with Corel’s Painter you will have some idea of what to expect from a ‘natural art’ package. Painter has numerous built-in effects to let you create pictures from scratch or modify images in such a way that they resemble paintings or drawings. Snap Art provides similar sorts of effect for users of other PhotoShop-compatible applications.
Snap Art provides plug-ins that can do everything from creating virtual pencil-sketches to oil paintings and pen-and-ink drawings. You can reduce the level of colour detail and enhance the edge definition in order to create comic-book pictures or you can transform images into a mass of individually painted ‘dots’ to mimic the work of pointillist painters.
The quality of the end results will inevitably depend on the quality of the original image. In particular, if you want to get the best from sketch or comic-book effects, you will need an image composed of well delimited areas of colour. For the very best results you may need to do some preparatory work in the host image editing application before letting Snap Art add the finishing touches.
Here the old mutt has been subjected to the ’Stylize’ effect.
And this is her audition for comic-book stardom...
As with other Alien Skin plug-ins, the Snap Art effects are extremely easy to use. Each effect is controlled using a popup tabbed dialog in which you can make selections to be applied to an entire image or to selected areas. There are numerous ready-to-use effects that can be selected from a list. If you want to have more precise control, you can flip from one tab to another and use sliders to alter parameters such as contrast, saturation and colour temperature; you can also pick canvases and papers to give the impression that the virtual paints, pencils and charcoals have been applied to a textured medium; and you can alter the lighting to pick out the three dimensional effects of ‘lumpy media’ such as oil paints.
Each effect can be adjusted in a tabbed dialog. Here the screen is divided so that you can preview the effect alongside a portion of the original image.
My favourite set of PhotoShop plug-ins (up to now) has been Alien Skin’s Eye Candy 5:Impact which includes ‘must have’ effects such as Glass and Chrome. These are especially useful for enhancing simple graphics and logos. But if you want to add a bit of artistic pizzazz to photographs, Snap Art is simply unbeatable.
Here I am with the dog. The charcoal effect seems a bit sketchier here than in the ’full face’ image at the top of this review, largely due to the fact that the image is ’busier’ with less clearly defined blocks of light and shade.
And here the same picture has been given a painted (’impasto’) make-over.
System Requirements: Windowx XP or later/ Mac OS X. Officially, Snap Art only works with Adobe PhotoShop CS or later; PhotoShop Elements 4 or later; or Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo XI or later. In fact, I have been using it very successfully with Fireworks 8. When I queried this with Alien Skin I was informed that there are some ‘compatibility issues’ with Fireworks: “Alien Skin is indeed aware that our products will ‘work’ within hosts that are not listed as supported for our products. The difference is that we’ve been able to test and resolve bugs within the hosts we do list as supported and feel confident in offering our free product support for issues that might arise during use within a tested and supported host.” Full Details of Requirements.
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