REVIEW: Alien Skin’s Snap Art Does What Photoshop Can’t (Page 2)

The Interface

Regular readers of my reviews know that the interface experience is a significant part of my final impression of a product. With that in mind, I must say that Snap Art’s interface is very good. It has many things going for it:

Plenty of presets. Each filter has around 20–30 presets already defined and clearly labeled. As I mentioned earlier, unless you are particular the presets will give you all that you want.

The Preview Split. Similar to what Lightroom does within its Develop module, Snap Art can split the image preview into two panes to show the original next to the filter results. It’s very flexible in this regard: you can specify any half of the image to show the filter results, even a diagonal half. I’m not sure this much flexibility is necessary in all cases, but if there’s an important part of the picture in one quadrant then it is very helpful.

Plenty of controls and settings. Every Snap Art filter has four basic panels: Basic, Colors, Canvas and Lighting. These panels each have a remarkable amount of controls: the Color Pencil filter alone has twenty. The presets allow you to skip the handling of these controls and still achieve great results, but if you like to experiment then Snap Art gives you a powerful amount of control that’s easy to implement.

Importing/exporting and e-mailing presets. Not only can you create your own presets in Snap Art, but you can export and import them as well. I believe there’s no excuse nowadays for a creative pro application to not import and export its presets. I am happy to see Snap Art doing it right. You can also send presets via e-mail at the click of a button, which is a simple process and very handy.

There is room for improvement:

Snap Art renders every change. Snap Art shows you the end result by default, and if you make a change or tweak something Snap Art is obligated to re-render the result. If you’re working with a photo with fair size or resolution, it will take a bit of time—and if you’re experimenting with the settings, those bits of time add up to chunks of time. The only way to suspend rendering is to click the Show Original button, which will hide the preview results, but it is designed to be only temporary—you must keep it pressed, and when you release it Snap Art will render the preview again. Adobe does it right by offering the Preview checkbox in most filter dialog boxes. Snap Art would benefit greatly from a Preview checkbox or something that allows users to skip all the renderings.

You cannot import your own background textures to serve as a ground. I would love to replace the default wood grain with a sample I have in my texture library, but Snap Art doesn’t allow that. Allowing the importing of backgrounds would make this software a lot better and allow more creativity.

One More Thing: No CMYK

Snap Art only works with RGB images. This is by design: Alien Skin decided Snap Art would be used mostly with photo images, which are always shot in RGB. This shouldn’t be a problem with those who end up working within the CMYK color space, since converting to RGB will not push any colors out of gamut. The biggest problem will be remembering this every time you try using Snap Art on a CMYK image and wondering why the menu item is grayed out. This is also by design: other RGB-only filters, such as Lens Flare and Lighting Effects, have always done this. Alien Skin kept things consistent by programming Snap Art to match the behavior of Photoshop’s pre-packaged filters.

Conclusion

Snap Art fills its niche very well. Photoshop’s own artistic and sketch filters are its biggest competition but it beats them handily with its superior algorithms, greater control and well-developed preset library. I don’t feel it is a replacement for Painter, however: that application has so many more features that I consider it a different beast altogether. Snap Art is for users who need to generate painterly effects quickly and professionally; if you want to work with the “digital brush” and create digital paintings or illustrations, stick with Painter.

The interface can be tweaked for better performance, but Snap Art as a whole is a strong addition to anyone’s Photoshop filter library.

Snap Art
Rating: 9/10
Produced by Alien Skin
Price $149