The Bottom Line
- Provides a good balance between realistic natural media effects and instant results.
- Hundreds of settings presets for single click effects.
- Manuals controls allow users to refine the effects to achieve a distinctive style.
- User interface is straightforward and intuitive, with detailed online help.
- Good value for the money. Discounts are offered for users of other Alien Skin products.
- I felt that realistic art qualities were lacking in some of the filters.
- Waiting for each edit to render in preview can be slow.
- Not supported with older systems and host programs.
Description
- Color Pencil - Renders hatch lines and shading to turn a photo into a color sketch.
- Comics - Give your photos a cartoon, comic strip, or Pop Art style with halftoning and blocks of posterized colors.
- Impasto - Transform your photos into this distinctive style of oil painting which features thick, textured paint strokes.
- Oil Paint - Recreate a variety of oil paint styles by adjusting thickness of paint, brush size, canvas texture and lighting.
- Pastel - Simulate the soft colors and tones of oil and chalk pastels.
- Pen & Ink - Render your image with dots and lines to mimic stippling, cross hatching, and shading.
- Pencil Sketch - Simulate a graphite or charcoal sketch with cross hatching and shading.
- Pointillism - Generates dots of color in the style of George Seurat. Color variation and dot size can be adjusted.
- Stylize - Generates smooth regions of color and bold lines for a Pop Art look. Color and line art options are available.
- Watercolor - Simulates a soft color wash with a dry or wet brush. Varying line detail and paper type can alter the effect.
Guide Review - Alien Skin Snap Art Artistic Effects Plug-In (Win/Mac)
As with all Alien Skin filters, the user interface is straightforward and intuitive, with numeric slider controls categorized by tabs for presets, effect basics, color, canvas, and lighting. Each of the ten filters in this collection includes 20-30 preset styles which users can apply with a single click. Snap Art uses edge detection to determine the shapes and forms in the original image to preserve details, then fills the image with abstract paint engine strokes. By varying the stroke size and other attributes of the specific media and canvas settings, users can simulate a variety of artistic styles.
Snap Art has an option to render the filtered image in a new layer, so your original image is preserved, making it easy for you to compare multiple designs with the original image. Within the Snap Art window, you can easily toggle the view to show filtered and unfiltered versions of the image. Snap Art also offers a split screen preview so you can compare the filtered and original image side-by-side. In addition to the presets included with the program, users can save their own custom settings as presets, and share those presets with other users of Snap Art.
I've reviewed a lot of "photo art" plugins and software over the years -- some provide instant results but often have a distinctly computer generated quality to them, while others require more fine tuning but produce very realistic natural media effects. Snap Art seems to provide a nice balance between instant results and artistic realism. I wasn't impressed with all the effects, but there are enough good ones here to get your money's worth.
