Alien Skin SnapArt review

There has long been a vogue for treating photographs to make them resemble paintings and drawings.

There are a number of filters within Photoshop that aim to perform the task, although these are frequently clumsy and difficult to use effectively. Alternatively, there are several third-party plug-ins, the latest of which is SnapArt, from AlienSkin.

SnapArt provides a do-it-all solution to the hand-drawn effect problem. Its 10 filters simulate a variety of techniques and offer varying degrees of success: when they're good, they're very good; when they're bad, they're embarrassing.

The filters fall into two categories: traditional drawing and painting effects, and special treatments. The traditional effects include Color Pencil (fairly convincing), Impasto (impressive, Van Gogh-style layers of thick oil paint), Pastel (less-convincing watery effect), Oil Paint (reasonable oil-on-canvas look), Pointillism (make your own Seurat: well achieved, but not of tremendous use) and Water Color (blurry smudges; the weakest of the bunch).

Two monochrome styles are Pencil Sketch, which produces good-looking images that appear to have been drawn with a soft pencil, and Pen and Ink, which turns everyday photographs into subtle illustrations made entirely of black and white strokes, complete with cross-hatching.

The two final filters in the suite are Stylize, a Pop Art style that creates both fields of airbrushed colour and, with its outline variation, a beautifully flowing illustration combining line art with optional colour fills; and Comics, which turns images into Liechtenstein-style comic book artwork.

All the filters come with dozens of presets with useful, descriptive names. When choosing Color Pencil, for instance, you can start with 'Abstract, fewer colors' or 'Landscape, more pencil pressure' before you begin to fine-tune the results. And it's when you begin fine-tuning that you discover the huge scope for customisation, and the fact that each of these complex filters takes a while to render. We may be talking about less than 10 seconds, but having to wait so long each time you tweak a slider can be pretty frustrating.

One solution is to reduce the preview window down to its absolute minimum to speed up preview times, but this is only a partial solution. Since a lot of tweaking is necessary to make the effect fit the image you're working on, this time-saving filter can, in the long run, take a lot of time to get right. Given that there are so many different options for each filter, and that even the tiniest adjustment means waiting for a new preview to render, many users will find themselves settling for results below the quality they know the filters can achieve.

As with all Alien Skin plug-ins, SnapArt uses a multi-pane environment that categorises each set of adjustments. After the basic Settings, where you choose a preset, comes Basic, which enables you to adjust pencil width, sketchiness, overall coverage and so on. Next up is the Colors tab, which offers such adjustments as 'cool/warm', as well as saturation and contrast. The Canvas tab offers a choice of a number of different canvas and paper textures, with the ability to change the size and thickness of each. Finally, the Lighting tab affects not just the canvas texture, but the highlights on the thicker oil paint styles, too. SnapArt builds in a new 'split' working method, which shows the original image and the treated version side by side - or one above the other, or split in a variety of different ways.