Company: Alien Skin Software
Website: www.alienskin.com
Price: $149 MSRP

Alternatives: Painter X (Corel),
Virtual Painter Plugin (P&A America, Inc.)

Three or four years ago a commercial art job came across my desk that screamed out for a particularly illustrated look. But the artwork provided by the ad agency was
photographic. I had once solved a similar project with a Photoshop filter that was no longer installed in my system. I searched for in on the web, but the company was long gone. This was a shame as it offered wonderful abilities very unlike those in Photoshop’s “Artistic” or “Sketch” suites.

Here is what the problem has been for a long time: Photoshop was kinda/sort designed for work on photos and
other more commercial graphics. While plenty of folks create all sorts of great art with it, the more natural media styling you want, the more work/technique/talent may be required. Photoshop simply wasn’t build ground up with that in mind. Its sadd-odd features like the filter suites and the brush controls all help, but if you really
want that natural media look you had to invest in something like Coral’s Painter.

Flash forward to today. Alien Skin Software, a great longtime developer of 3^rd party Photoshop plugins has released a new suite of natural media filters called “Snap Art”. As the name so bluntly proclaims, these filter’s singular goal is to make the creation of artsy looking images “a snap”. We took a look to see how well they succeeded.

Options & Interface

The Snap Art interface is enabled under the menu option FILTER > Alien Skin Snap Art > and then you have 10 style options to choose from the sub-menu. These style options are also available from within the suite’s interface so you can switch from one to another without exiting the interface.

It’s obvious that the developer put some real thought and energy into the product to make it easier to use and navigate. For example, the interface is organized in a very logical and easy to navigate fashion. The first tab (oddly called “Settings” instead of perhaps “Presets”) for each style starts off with a long list of pre-fabricated filter settings.

Clicking through these pre-fab options gets the user up and running with the range and feel of each style. Perhaps one of these is just what you are looking for, great. If not, find the one that is the nearest and proceed to the other tabs for more tweaking.

The following tabs are called Basic, Tone/Color, Canvas and Lighting. Each tab’s settings offer a creative range of customizations that vary from style to style.

The Basic tab contains controls that are specific to the selected filter style. So the Color Pencil filter’s Basic tab will have controls like “pencil width” and pencil pressure” among others, and the Oil Paint style will have similar items plus a more exotic “Brush Style” pop-up menu of options. Each one will vary. Don’t be confused however, these are not like your normal brush setting that effect YOUR brush. Rather these settings merely guide the filtering process to the desired end results.

The Tone or Color tab naming varies on whether the style contains color or is monochromatic. In either case this tab contains both a Brightness and Contrast sliders, which seem to control the input data rather than the output, which would be the normal assumption. Other sliders in color Styles include Saturation and controls to alter the color hue or temperature. In the Tone tabs there are color channel sliders that allow varying the strength each color channel contributes to the grayscale image. Nice touch!

The remaining two tabs appear to be consistent between all the styles. The Canvas tab allows for the selection of the substrate texture. The options include a reasonably diverse range of papers, canvas styles and some more exotic items like wood, leather and even brick. The Lighting controls seem to work largely as attributes for the texture set in the previous tab. It appears to also have an effect on any texture that is already part of a style, like “Impasto”.

While I could see these tabs do their thing, I found the results from the texture settings less than predictable. Perhaps they were more subtle than I was expecting. I was looking for something at least remotely like those found in Photoshop’s Texture filter, but these textures were far less identifiable. Since none of the help or document files elaborated on it much I must assume I am using them correctly.

The rest of the interface is very straightforward, with pan and zoom controls and a clever popup menu that allows the selection of regions to display the previews on the image. For example, select just the left hand side of the photo, or maybe below a diagonal selection. This option is less useful than being able to marquee a custom rendering zone, but helpful nonetheless.

In addition to allowing an A/B comparison, sectional image previews speeds up the process. These filters are intense and time consuming. So slow are they to render a preview that it feels almost like a 3D process rather than a 2D, since there is little to no real time interactivity. But this is the first release of the suite and optimization is usually a rev 2 initiative, so they get a pass on it from me. The final rendering times occur in a reasonable amount of time.

The Filter Styles
Now lets get down to the main event and look at the ten filter styles in the suite:

Color Pencil, Comics, Impasto, Oil Paint, Pastel, Pen & Ink, Pencil Sketch, Pointillism, Stylize, Water Color. Overall the filters in the Snap Art suite are excellent, well designed and in a couple of instances brilliantly executed. Some are less so, but that is fine, and that is also just one person’s opinion, your’s may vary. Let’s take a closer look at a few of these filters.

Oil Painting: This filter does what Adobe’s “Palette Knife” filter should have but never came close to doing. It really does make an image feel like an oil painting. The perfectionists among us may say a better description is that it makes it look much like a photograph of an oil painting. The brush strokes do not look repetitive as we
have seen with similar filters from other sources. And the bump mapping and highlighting effects look really good.

Take a look at the accompanying images and you will see both a “factory default” version, which I found too eavy-handed, and another version that I modified using the controls in the Basics tab. I wanted the image to look more as if it were painted by a brush rather than the wide/rough strokes of a palette knife. I think the results from just 30 seconds of weaking look quite good.

Some of the other presets were interesting as well, and I gave the “portrait photo realistic” a try. It was closer to what I sought but still removed too much detail. I began to think this may be a result of using an image whose resolution was too small. I applied the same default setting to the same image pre-scaled at 100% and a copy at 200%. Both version resulted in the very same brush strokes and highlights/reflections, though the 200% was merely scaled up that same amount. So this filter at least doesn’t appear to be directly affected by resolution.

(NOTE: In additional testing other filters do seem to be resolution dependent for their brush size/length settings. This means that testing small and doing a final version large is not a direct translation and will require more fiddling.)

Impasto:
This is a cool looking style whose default settings basically creates heavy swirling brush strokes that make an image appear to be a long lost Van Gogh. Other presets give quite different renderings which are equally interesting. This is a testament to the power of the Impasto filter.

Pencil Sketch: This is probably my favorite of the filters. A fact which may have something to do with my taking life drawing classes most of my life. I find the range of realistic sketching styles that this filter can create is nothing short of breathtaking. I was so impressed that I had to make a number of samples of this one image to show you. Each image is quite different and yet all look like they could have been created with an artists hand. Again, none of the drawing or sketching filters in Photoshop’s arsenal comes close to this. This filter did well with
almost every image I threw at it.

Stylize: In its default setting Stylize made this particular image look very much like a Picasso, however other presets created imagery reminiscent of other artists. This is a fun filter and one that creatively explores new directions.

As for some of the others, to my eye, the Pointalism filter was predictable, and results from the Pastel style were uniformly excellent with any image used.

Disappointing Filters: There are a couple that I didn’t like. Some, perhaps, because I am just not a fan of the style of art, like “Colored Pencils”, so this may be no reflection on the filter. The “Comic” filter however just didn’t do it for me, even though I wanted it to. I think it was the Shading Pattern” that irked me. The Water Color filter was omething of a disappointment as well, but perhaps more tweaking would solve that.

Bottom Line
I was very pleasantly impressed with this collection. The best of the filters are outstanding creations,
and the lesser styles can be played with until something worthwhile is found. For myself I find it a broad range of styles, but of course have my favorites. It they sold these a la carte I would run out and buy the Pencil Sketch style in a second and buy extras for my friends. But as a complete package for of 10 filters for only $149 msrp, I would just buy one for myself.

The bottom line is that these are so good you may finally forgive yourself for never buying and learning Painter.