Alien Skin offers instant paint plug-in
Posted by Kathleen Maher on July 16th 2007 | Discuss
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PRODUCEABLE ART
There’s no such thing as easy art but that doesn’t mean I don’t keep trying. Snap Art, a plug-in program from Alien Skin, seems to promise users a shot at becomming high art with a few push buttons. In the end, you can get some pretty interesting creations but as in all things, the more effort you put into it, the better your end result will be. And, this being a computer and all, the old rule, garbage in/garbage out still holds.
I have used several Paint Programs and I enjoy them a great deal. The leading example is Corel’s Painter. It is a tool that lets artists create original art in the computer with pen tablet, their imagination and an infinite combination of brushes, styles, paints, papers, lighting, etc. And, it has extensive tools for adding artistic effects to photographs. Snap Art doesn’t aspire to be Painter, it aspires to give artists a fast way to add aristic effects to photos. For artists who use Adobe Photoshop’s filters or for those who have been frustrated by their limitations, Snap Art is going to open up lots of possibilities.
I tested it as a plug-in for Photoshop (though it can also be used with Corel’s PaintShop Pro Photo XI or later) and after a few frustrating attempts to make water color, oil paint, or pastel filters work I realized the way to work with this program is to just have at it and create lots of variations on a theme. One of its really nice features is the option to run the filter and save the result as a separate layer in Photoshop. I then found that by turning on and off certain layers and adjusting the opacity so that various features could come, through I could get some really nice effects, and it wasn’t as hard as painting the image as you usually do using a product like Painter.
Photoshop has a pretty nice lineup of filters already installed. So, if you’re someone who might occasionally use a tool like Snap Art but not necessarily use it all the time, you might wonder why you’d want to spend $145 for Snap Art. Well that does depend, but Snap Art is really much easier and more interactive to use than Photoshop’s own tools which seem to require a lot more trial, error, and “oh rats” undo, than Snap Art. I suspect that’s a benefit of Alien Skin’s long experience in the filter business.
Sadly, at least so far, Snap Art is not a great way to redeem mediocre images though I had high hopes in that direction. I had a really nice photo of a couple that I shot completely out of focus. I can’t bring myself to delete it but I can’t do a thing with it. I had hoped maybe I could find the edges and recreate the image as an oil painting and that’s when I once again learned the hard rule of garbage in/garbage out. This is the kind of problem that would require more painting using a program like Painter and it would probably require a tad more talent than I’m blessed with. After all, if I were just a touch more talented I might have managed to focus the picture in the split seconds god gave me to take the picture.
Snap Art was developed to mimic the way an artist works with underpainting—creating a light pencil sketch as a guide. It works by finding edges and determines the shapes of the objects in the original image. Then when you choose a particular filter style, Snap Art’s paint engine can fill in the sketch it has created according to the variations you choose.
It’s pretty easy to waste an afternoon playing with effects but Snap Art lets you save the setting used in a successful session so you don’t have to go through the whole trial and error process again. In fact, I wasted several afternoons before I got the hang of the program but now that I have, it is going to be used. The most satisfying effects for me have turned out to be more basic effects, pencil sketches, pen and ink drawings, and cartoons and stylize which is good for poster effects. Combinations of pen and ink with paint work very well.
Image editing still challenges the processor. I have a very stable, young HP Workstation with dual Pentium 4 360 GHz CPUs. It has to think about things. This can get a tad tedious when you’re trying out variations on effects. It’s a good reason to save effects you’ve had good luck with. This would also seem to be the type of program where hardware shaders would be a real kick in the pants for the software...maybe next time.
The bottom line still
seems to be the bottom line. At $145, Snap Art is a professional tool. There
are less expensive ways to get similar effects. On the other hand, at $145 Snap
Art is a no brainer for artists who want to use these effects fairly
frequently. The amount of time saved pays for the product. 
