Snap Art

Alien Skin boldly states that Snap Art features “a variety of brushes, pencils, pastels and pens, as well as an assortment of canvas and paper types”. The problem is, so do Photoshop’s native filter effects – so what’s left to say about this plug-in that Adobe’s graphics editor doesn’t already offer?

Well, put simply, Snap Art is a tool for lazy designers and makes absolutely no apologies for it. Once added to your plug-ins folder, any number of traditional artistic styles can then be applied to your image, all of which look fantastic and save you lots of time and effort.

The ten key filters in Snap Art are: Pastel, Impasto, Oil Painting, Colour Pencil, Comics, Pencil Sketch, Pointillism, Stylize, Watercolour, and Pen and Ink. They’re all incredibly straightforward and produce excellent results. The Comic effect, in particular, posterizes colour and shading to give a truly impressive Pop Art effect, and the Oil Painting filters bring globulous lumps of paint to the canvas.

It’s true that all of these effects can, to an extent, be created in established apps such as Photoshop and Painter. In-built filters aside, all of Snap Art’s features depend on colour blends, shading and halftone manipulation, augmented by a brush stroke, sketch or stylise filter.

Snap Art, however, manages to make these effects more immediate, making the task much easier. Usefully, you can check a real-time preview to fine-tune the individual filter adjustments (of which there are roughly double those of Photoshop’s natural filters), save the results to new layers and generally expand on any natural artistic effects.