Julie Smyth : 2007
Cool: An extremely cool Photoshop plugin.
Uncool: Nothing much, as software goes this is too cool for school.
I first heard of the Alien Skin people way back in 1997 when I ventured onto the Internet looking for a way to enhance my Photoshop images easily. I quickly discovered a Photoshop Plugin called EyeCandy, which is still around today and is probably the best known filtering tool for Photoshop. Net-wise, things have changed dramatically since 1997 and I was quite pleased to be asked to review Alien Skin's latest offing "Snap Art" ten years on from my first encounter with their products.
So, what does it do? Simply, it allows you to take your boring images and easily transform them into pieces of art, from Impasto to Comics to Pencil Sketching to Oil Paintings ... it's all there and it's all easy to implement.
I subjected the image below to the "comics" filter with great results.
There are 10 different filters available in the Snap Art Plugin:
- Color Pencil
- Comics
- Impasto
- Oil Paint
- Pastel
- Pen and Ink
- Pencil Sketch
- Pointillism
- Stylize
- Water Color
There are multiple variables for each filter, so in fact there is a lot of depth to the product and a lot of tinkering to be done by Photoshop enthusiasts.
Of course, Photoshop comes with its own inbuilt "Artistic" filters which enables you, in theory, to do much the same thing as Snap Art. The plugin, however, just adds to the fun because in my opinion you can never have too many Photoshop filters and my results varied dramatically to the inbuilt filters.
Snap Art's interface is easy to use, the filters are pretty well self-explanatory, there's loads of options to play with and the results are pretty impressive. In fact, it's a snap and the product gets a definite thumbs up from me.
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