Because I rarely print directly from Photoshop, I’m not the best to ask about this, but I would take Alien Skin’s word for it and the info can be found on their website (linked below). While Alien Skin suggests adjusting your image dimensions and establishing your “print size” in Photoshop prior to running Snap Art 3 to optimize resolution, I round tripped my images from Aperture (as a full sized, 300dpi TIFF file) through Photoshop, saved back in and printed in Aperture to final size (which in my case was on 11″ x 14″ canvas) and the results are beautiful. So, it was only natural that I would use Snap Art 3 along with some of my images to print on larger canvas. I’ve always loved images printed on canvas. Here are a few areas that I instantly found the Snap Art 3 plugin to be useful and produce fun results. After playing around with it, I realized that it is so intuitive, it’s best to watch a couple of the videos on Alien Skin’s website to grasp the basics and everything just easily unfolds through a little experimentation. When I was jotting notes as I went through the software, initially I thought it would be good to walk you through the interface and all that it offers. How about the eyes? Yeah, throw a third mask on there to bring them back to near pure reality to make them pop! Want that subject’s face to be even clearer/realistic still? Easy. While Photoshop is still king when it comes to layer masks, the ability to produce 3 individual, manipulatable masks within Snap Art means, a more complete and useful plugin with less time spent overall in Photoshop being necessary! Want a single subject to stand out from a background, easy. You can mask inside Snap Art 3 revealing a completely user controlled amount of “photo reality” within the software! Three times in one image!!! Simply put, that is spectacular and endlessly useful. Actually, I think that deserves a second immediate mention. Add to that, the ability to mask (selectively remove effect) directly inside the program to bring back detail for portraits, macros or creatively applied surreality and you have a really powerful and concise image creation plugin. With over a hundred presets (I lost count), and next to unlimited modification from brush size, coverage, surface texture and medium you might say it is as complete an automated digital painting program as most any photographer may need. But, aside from the remarkable control from oil paint, watercolor and impasto, you can instantly change you image into a comic, or colored pencil sketch, chalk or oil pastel and more. Of course, if you don’t like the idea of turning your high resolution digital images into a painting, then read no further I guess. The Alien Skin team has just released the third iteration of this plugin, and because it is my first go around with it, I can’t compare it to the previous releases, but man oh man is this program awesome. Read on for initial feelings and examples…Īt first, when I’d heard about the Snap Art series, I’d just kind of ignored it as I’ve had so many other cool plugins and standalones that I’ve used and enjoyed to get my images where I want them to be.
A plugin for either Photoshop or Lightroom, the seamless and intuitive interface can help you produce digital paintings and drawings with a variety of media in a matter of seconds.
Well, I’ve always wanted to be able to finely tune, and offer digital painting as a conversion for a digital picture file both personally and professionally, and until I tried my hand at Alien Skin’s Snap Art 3, I had resigned myself to putting it on the bucket list. I have tried Corel’s Painter, which is an amazing program, but one that requires just short of a masters degree to fully understand, and is in my opinion much better utilized by those who are already decent actual painters. So, into my life fell digital photography, but there was that tactile, artistic void left behind. One thing I’ve always wanted to be better at, but was never able to hone my skill, is painting. Be that through actions, plugins or standalone software, I like to use my pictures in a variety of different ways. Anyone familiar with my blog knows I’m a fan of artistic, digital image file manipulation.