Alien Skin Software has released Snap Art, a new Photoshop plug-in that claims to create beautiful, natural media artwork in a single step. The plug-in renders any image in a variety of real-world art styles including oil paint, pencil sketch, pen & ink, comics, and more.
It could be great for stylizing graphics and photos; the company says Snap Art works without laborious hand editing and is more versatile than Actions or brushes.
Here’s how it works: it mimics how a conventional artist would use an underdrawing to outline key objects in a composition. Snap Art uses edge detection to discern the objects, edges, lines, and shapes of an original image. Then, using this outline, an advanced paint engine strokes and fills this outline using the brushes and colors you specify.
I’ve looked at the samples here and they’re quite impressive.
[Via: PhotoshopNews.com]