AKVIS’—ArtWork

This was a fun plug-in that can help you create a comic painting/oil painting effect with your photographs. Here I used it to great the effect of a boy looking down at his reflection which really looks like he is looking into a painted world.
This was not hard to do and even easier with this plug-in. You can also use this plug-in to add text to you image and apply special effects.
To do this you add the text into the native filter environment and apply a stroke and a fill. After that you may apply glow to the text and then render. This was a neat and unexpected addition to this filter. The rendered text results in rasterized text content that cannot be edited. However, the results render very well and don’t exhibit some of the aliasing quirks that you sometimes get with Photoshop.
All in all, ArtWork is a good purchase if getting your photographs to look like you painted them.

AlphaPlugins—Engraver II

Engraver is a neat Photoshop plug-in that turns a picture into a neat piece of art representing an engraving, lithograph, pencil sketch and other hand art styles. You can get really clever and creative and make a masterpiece in a very simple way.
The Engraver software could be a nice addition to add to your Photoshop/software library and give you that something extra to create an interesting project. Engraver is very easy to use and Alpha Plug-in’s website has an easy to use tutorial. Engraver cost around $50.00.
The bottom line to Engraver is that allows you to turn a photograph into a graphical image with lines and hatches of different width and curvatures. The lines can be straight, wave, spiral, dotted and in color or black and white.
Engraver is easy to use and you can see your results immediately and makes changes before saving. If you saw the recent President Obama poster that was creating a stir, I think that poster is a good example of Engraver. I am not saying that Engraver was used but that is a possible result of using a photograph and tweaking it to make it different with lines and color.  While this was screen printed it has been discovered that it was screen printed from a photograph. Engraver would have been a easier solution (but still not legal).

I also enjoyed using the product website. You can test this product for yourself by downloading a free trial from www.alphaplugins.com.