REVIEW: Alien Skin’s Snap Art Does What Photoshop Can’t

I have always had a complaint about the artistic and sketch filters that are included with Photoshop. I worked with them early in my graphic design career but, being trained as a painter and pencil-pusher myself, I found their quality lacking. I expected the Colored Pencil filter to make my photos look like they were created with colored pencil—but they looked more like crayon doodles. Some of them were pretty good, like the Watercolor filter, and I could live with the deficiencies because Photoshop did so many other things so well. A few years later I invested some time and money into learning Painter and that’s what I use now whenever I create illustrations from photos. With Painter, when I’m done the photo looks like a real work of art.

Plenty Of Options For Artists And Illustrators

Snap Art by Alien Skin is a set of filters that do a much better job than Photoshop’s own artistic and sketch filters. Alien Skin is the gold standard in cool Photoshop plug-ins, and this one is no different though it’s not as flashy as the special effect packages like Eye Candy or Xenofex. Snap Art delivers ten different artistic media:

• Color Pencil
• Comics
• Impasto
• Oil Paint
• Pastel
• Pen and Ink
• Pencil Sketch
• Pointillism
• Stylize
• Watercolor

I’m happy to see that almost all of these filters are clearly recognizable as artistic media or styles (I don’t know why the posterization filter, which creates work in the Pop Art style, is called Stylize). In contrast, Photoshop has some hard-to-recognize filters like Stamp, Poster Edges and Reticulation. Before the Filter Gallery, it was tough to judge what a Photoshop filter might do without actually running it first. Snap Art appeals to fine artists with a knowledge of their craft: who else would know what “impasto” means, or the difference between hot press and cold press paper? Snap Art uses all these terms and knows how to recreate them digitally.

Strong Technology Behind The Art

I think Snap Art’s algorithms for recreating artistic effects are very good, better than Photoshop’s. When I use Snap Art, I feel pretty certain that the end result will be good enough to stand alone as an illustration or artwork. I have really good luck with the presets that come with Snap Art: they have simple descriptions like “Portrait, warm colors” or “Brush, oil pastel” and they alone will get you great results most of the time. Snap Art does a great job of recreating the look of the media, whether it’s paint, pastel, pencil or ink. The look of the ground—paper, cloth, wood or other backing—is less perfect and sometimes I don’t notice a difference when I change the canvas, but that’s also affected by the media on top of it. I do have a problem with the wood canvas, because to me it looks more like wavy lines than actual wood grain. You can actually achieve something like Van Gogh’s Starry Starry Night with it. Read the section below regarding the interface to see how I’d change this feature.

Artistic Styles

I appreciate the fact that Snap Art recreates some popular artistic styles:

The Comics filter creates some great combinations of halftoning and posterization to create true comic book effects. This filter takes some experimentation but you can achieve great results. The presets are also effective, though I wish they included some that actually focused on comic book styles—the presets are based on things like the kind of shading and the artistic style (like Pop Art). Wouldn’t it be cool if there were a preset for old comics (think Golden and Silver Age comics) and one for new? Comic book fans know there’s a huge difference. If you want to create these styles, you’ll have to experiment for yourself.

Impasto, unlike the Oil Paint filter, is an artistic style that uses a thick, painterly application of paint. Brushstrokes and palette knife swipes are clearly visible and the resulting artwork is less photorealistic but still very compelling. Artists who paint en plein air (outside, from life) will love this filter.

You can’t have a set of artistic plug-ins without one that recreates the Pointillism style, which was popularized by the French painter Georges Seurat and others painters from France and America. This particular plug-in really excels at recreating the Pointillist style, just as well as Painter if not better.

Don’t let the name of the Stylize filter fool you. It might as well be called the Pop Art filter, though that would deny its ability to create black-and-white line art. Maybe there should have been separate Pop Art and Line Art filters.