The Bottom Line
Snap Art 2 by Alien Skin is a plug-in effect system for Photoshop and Photoshop Elements and the newest release of the Snap Art line. Snap Art 2 quickly and easily creates painting and drawing effects with photographs. While the cost is a bit high for casual amateurs (list price $199), this is a very powerful system that serious amateurs and pros alike will find extremely useful and fun to play with.
Review of Snap Art 3 Now Available
Review of Snap Art 3 Now Available
Pros
- Very customizable output
- Nice effect variety
- Strong tutorials on Alien Skin site
- Works on PC and Mac
Cons
- Price
- So many options they can become confusing
Description
- Color pencil, Comic, Impasto, Oil paint, Pastel, Pencil sketch, Pen and ink, Pointillism, Stylize, and Watercolor options
- Allows for precision control of the rendition process
- Strong tutorials available on Alien Skin website at no charge
- Trial copy of software available form Alien Skin at no charge
Guide Review - Photo Software
Snap Art 2 by Alien Skin gives photographers very strong tools to create wonderful painting and drawing effects with their images in Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. While Adobe has some built in effects that are similar, Snap Art 2 allows the photographer control over basically every aspect of the image as the effect is being created and offers some stock default settings for a quick starting point.
While effects have a huge number of controls (lighting, contrast, type of pixalization, color oddities, brush sizes, vignette, etc) the preset selections offer good starting points so that creating beautiful renditions does not take hours.
Controls within Snap Artare relatively intuitive and pop up tip boxes when the control name is hovered over with the mouse cursor quickly clarify any questions. This software much more realistically copies various styles of painting and drawing. One the favorite options in this plug-in is the focus regions tool that allows the photographer to set areas such as eyes at different clarity than other parts of the image quickly and easily. This is especially helpful on portraits.
While effects have a huge number of controls (lighting, contrast, type of pixalization, color oddities, brush sizes, vignette, etc) the preset selections offer good starting points so that creating beautiful renditions does not take hours.
Controls within Snap Artare relatively intuitive and pop up tip boxes when the control name is hovered over with the mouse cursor quickly clarify any questions. This software much more realistically copies various styles of painting and drawing. One the favorite options in this plug-in is the focus regions tool that allows the photographer to set areas such as eyes at different clarity than other parts of the image quickly and easily. This is especially helpful on portraits.
Disclosure: A review copy was provided by the publisher. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.