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.

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.

[5] Snap Art
Rating: 9/10
Produced by [6] Alien Skin
Price $149