Snap Art Plug-In Does Natural Media with a Click

Alien Skin has released a new plug-in filter that will quickly turn photos into natural media artwork with minimal effort. Snap Art has left me with a bit of a dilemma. It works exactly as described and the resulting artwork is really cool. But if you are a user of Corel PHOTO-PAINT, you won't find much more that you can't do with the native filters included with Corel PHOTO-PAINT. Since those filters don't exist in Adobe Photoshop, this set of plug-ins would make a lot more sense to a Photoshop user.

There are a total of ten filters included: Color Pencil, Comics, Impasto, Oil Paint, Pastel, Pen and Ink, Pencil Sketch, Pointillism, Stylize and Water Color. After selecting each of those filters, there are a large number of presets. Something like 30 presets for each filter. You can also customize the settings to your heart's desire including things like sizes, colors, canvas type, lighting and more. Below is the main dialog box for the Stylize filter. There are four other tabs of settings in addition to the presets shown here.

If you have a need to create natural media images from photos, this package gives you tons of options and does a great job. Corel PHOTO-PAINT users that only occasionally need this type of effect probably won't find Snap Art to be as useful. It certainly does more than what is included with Corel PHOTO-PAINT, but it isn't the same as not having the filters at all.

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