Access Digital Photography

I’m a big fan of Photoshop plug-in filters simply because they make the creation of a specific feat…especially having to do with special or photographic effects…so controllable and easy. Some folks consider this a cop-out because, let’s face it, if you have the time and the knowledge and the mental retention, there’s dang little you can’t do using Photoshop alone. Here’s the way I figure it: If the plug-in doesn’t save me enough time to pay for itself within a couple of months of use, don’t buy it. Whether this is true for any given product is going to turn out to be a different reality for different people. And that’s the nice thing about blogs like this: I can relate my experience and you can see if you can relate to it. This first experiential review is about a new filter from Alien Skin called Snap Art. It’s job is turning digital or digitized photos into “works of art.”

I figure the easiest way to show you what the program can do is to take one photograph and then “re-interpret” in all the different styles the program can do. The photo I started with is the one above. I figured it was a great compromise between a color chart and a portrait.

Colored Pencil is the name of the first effect. You can use dozens of variations and all you have to do is to click for a preview and then click OK when you see the one you like. You can choose lighter, darker, and more contrasty version. You can also choose lighter, darker, and more “contrasty” versions, as well as from a variety of paper textures, such as “canvas”.

Comic Strip gives you strong, Andy Warhol-type halftoning, very bright colors, and clearly-defined outlines. Variants are, once again, extensive. You can do several varieties of black-and-white, too. Of course, you could also use any of the Photoshop or Lightroom black and white techniques on any of the images produced by Snap Art or any other “interpretative” filter, just by combining the layers and then using a grayscale channel mixer or the Black and White command in Photoshop.

Impasto. As its name implies, the Impasto look does a great imitation of heavily dabbed-on oil paints. You have many choices as to the intensity of color, stroke size, degree of impasto effect, etc. Best of all, I could put virtually all of them to good use. Of course one of the benefits of working in digital media is that you can combine media effects by putting different variations on different layers and then erasing through them.

Oil may sound like the same thing as Impasto, but the brush strokes are much more defined…more like classic oils. There’s quite a bit of variation in styles. What you see here is called “Portrait Oil on Canvas.” There’s everything from splotchy abstract to nearly indistinguishable “photo-realism.

Pastel, as you might suspect, gives the image a much softer look than the classic oils. As with all the other styles, there’s lots of variation in the styles you can choose simply by clicking on the styles list. In addition to the Settings tabs that I’ve been using, there are also tabs titled Basic, Tone, Canvas, and Lighting. Each of these has adjustment sliders for a half-dozen or so variables.

Pen and Ink has enough variables to give you just about any drawing style…especially if you go beyond the basic Settings and start changing pen width, stroke-length, ink colors, blah, blah, blah, blah….

Pencil Sketch is another black and white only interpretation. This is a much more defined style than Pen and Ink. It also includes Charcoal variants. You could also do your own variants on the black and white shading by first using the Photoshop Channel Mixer with the Monochrome box check to make the image that will be processed by Snap Art.

Pointilism, as you know if you took an art history class, is all little plips and plops of points of color. I could really get a lot out of this technique by making several interpretations, stacking them as layers and then using the Eraser and Blend modes to blend them together. The effect you see here, however, is simply one of the variations listed on the Settings tab.

Stylize mixes diffent styles of sketch lines and paints—once again, every way from Sunday. I think this one is the most fun of them all…especially when used with this subject.

Watercolor was a wee bit of a disappointment, thanks to having been very spoiled by the Buzz Pro program that really can make watercolors look professional. Still, look at it this way: Snap Art is a very useful program with lots of worthwhile effects…all in one package. Given the amount of additional effects that you can get by working in layers to combine effects with layer opcacity and Blend Modes, and using such Photoshop tools as the Blur brush, this program is a very good value.

Hint: Watercolor could make any good portraitist or landscape photographer a lot of extra money in very little extra time.
Tip: There are now all manner of effects in Alien Skin’s Exposure, Image Doctor, and Xenofex plug-ins to give you even more SnapArt effects when you combine them, either by creating other layers in one or more of those effects and then giving those layers varying opacities and blend modes, or by treating the Snap Art rendition of your original file with the result of one or more of the other filters. Go nuts and have a ball!

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 2nd, 2009 at 4:34 pm and is filed under Digital Photography News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.