As seen above, Alien Skin has released Snap Art 4, featuring an example image from yours truly! I am a big fan of the Alien Skin plugins and with this new release, they’ve continued to refine one of their most unique offerings.
Painting has never been so easy. With their most recent release, Alien Skin has yet again upped the ante on creative digital photography plugins. Snap Art 4 provides many jumping off points and the final result can vary between a single click, or as much time as you’d like to throw at a painted rendition of your digital image. The use of improved masks and even more creative controls, Snap Art 4 builds on what was already a powerful and fun tool. C’mon in to see more examples and info…
I have always enjoyed paintings. I grew up with my mom doing quite a bit of it and for whatever reason, that particular skill set just didn’t seem to genetically find me. It hasn’t stopped me from trying various digital variations through photography and software though. I’ve attempted to learn Corel’s painter, which is an amazing program but takes about as much time to learn as Photoshop. I’ve tried other quick stop, one click plugins that have been fun, but never really provided the quality I had hoped for, until I stumbled across Snap Art a few years ago. A plugin that impressed me has just gotten better, and that is a really cool thing.
Offering a variety of mediums from pen and ink to impasto, oil paint to watercolor, you can start with a preset and manipulate and mask to your hearts content. The light direction adjustments have gotten more detailed by allowing not only the angle to be adjusted, but the direction and highlight color as well. Much like Alien Skin’s Exposure 5, the layout and interface have changed considerably from the previous version. This is a great thing in my experience as it is truly tailored to work seamlessly with other software, and provides a very comfortable, familiar layout with presets on the left and your controls on the right via collapsable panels and accessed via a scroll as opposed to the previous tabs for the different panels in version 3.
The masking is easy, quick and remarkably efficient. By painting a mask into the image, you can manipulate what that area looks like within the Masked Areas panel. I have been using this to add just a little more realism back into images in the way of focal points, faces, eyes, etc.
Alien Skin’s Snap Art 4 is available through Alien Skin’s website for $99, or as an upgrade for existing Snap Art owners for $69. Free upgrades will be automatically sent to everyone who purchased Snap Art 3 directly from Alien Skin Software in August 2013 or later. ***If looking to save a little coin, ALL Alien Skin Plugins are on sale for 30% off until this Friday, December 6th!
Click HERE to go to Alien Skin’s Website to see more on Snap Art 4 and their other awesome plugins.
System requirements for, and host applications able to run the Snap Art 4 plugin are as follows:
Snap Art 4 may be used as a standalone program or a plug-in. When it is used as a plug-in it requires one of the following host applications:
Adobe Photoshop CS6, or CC
Adobe Photoshop Elements 12 or newer
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 or newer
Apple Aperture 3 or newer
System Requirements
Microsoft Windows users need Windows 7 or newer.
Apple Macintosh users need Mac OS X 10.8 or newer.
An Intel Core 2 processor or compatible is required.
A monitor with 1280×768 resolution or greater is required.
As always, I’d suggest at least downloading a free trial, give it a spin and see what you can do with it!
Thanks for the read and happy shooting,
Tyson