And yet,
there comes a time in even the least creative art director's
career when he or she needs to create original art, whether
it be a concept sketch or just text that needs a little more
treatment than might be found in his or her font collection.
Enter Propeller Paint Engine for Adobe Photoshop.
What
it does
Propeller Paint Engine is a plugin module for Adobe Photoshop
that essentially acts like an application within an application.
Its primary function is to provide tools for painting in a way
that emulates natural media, and it also provides some more
fanciful tools for painting with organic material, objects and
effects patterns. So the tools range from watercolor to pencil
to charcoal and licorice vines to fire to fern leaves.
You access
the paint tools simply by selecting the Propeller plugin from
Photoshop's Filter menu. A new interface then pops up containing
all the tools and your current layer.
The
Propeller Paint Engine interface. Click image for larger view.
Once there,
you simply select your tools and get to work. When you're done,
you click OK, and your painting is applied to your layer on
top of what was already there while preserving whatever transparency
that was there as well.
What's especially
nice about this plugin is that you can use any image as a brush
or brush pattern. The paint engine will allow you to bring images
in and then "track" them as you paint, meaning that
it follows the direction of your strokes, as well as pressure
and tilt, if you happen to be using a pressure-sensitive and/or
tilt-sensitive tablet and stylus.
A
sampling of some of Propeller's preset brushes.
The range
of effects you can create using Propeller are pretty much unlimited.
Although the plugin doesn't ship with all that many brushes
and patterns (108 brushes and 28 patterns), you can use any
image of your own to paint with. Propeller can automatically
colorize it to match one of the existing color palettes, or
you can use the original color from the image. Propeller will
allow you to modify the image just as you would modify any of
the preset brushes, and it will allow for the same sort of tracking,
pressure sensitivity, etc. that the presets have.
Tool
control
When you first look at the Propeller interface, you see a very
simple toolbar consisting of traditional paintbrush, eraser,
color selector, magnifying glass and hand tools. To start working,
you just select the paintbrush tools and apply your strokes.
This is called ease of use.
For functionality,
this program—er, plugin—offers a degree of control
that's entirely uncommon in Photoshop filters.
To begin
with, you have three primary tabs that determine how your stroke
will look: Brush, Color and Pattern. Under each tab, you get
a pulldown menu of categories containing various sets of brushes,
color palettes and patterns. You can even create your own categories
and add your favorite brushes (or patterns) or your own brushes
(or patterns) to the collections. You can also modify color
palettes by adding to them and then saving them as separate
sets.
The Brush
and Pattern palettes in Propeller
Each brush
you can select includes a default patterns and color, but you
can swap out colors and patterns as you see fit.
But these
are only the beginning. You can also interactively control the
stroke, effect and dynamics of each brush. Stroke controls include
opacity, size, sweep and angle. Opacity, size and sweep and
also be assigned ranges, and angle can be set to "constant"
or "track." (Ranges come into play in Propeller's
Dynamics engine, detailed below.)
For effects,
you can choose from taper (none, edge, center, upper, lower),
border (with options for color and thickness) and two other
groups of effects. These include diffuse, bleed, spin and shake,
with individual settings for each.
One
brush with several different effects applied.
Effects modify the way a stroke appears, adding
taper, border, diffusion, bleed,
spin, shake, etc.
Finally,
we come to my favorite feature: the ability to control the dynamics
of the stroke. The Propeller Paint Engine supplies a simple
graph of input options corresponding to stroke parameters. For
example, you can use speed to control stroke size, while pressure
controls opacity.
To assign
an input option to a parameter, you just draw a line from an
input option to the parameter you want it to control. One input
option (such as pressure) can control any number of parameters
(such as opacity and color), but each parameter can only be
controlled by one input option. To change which input option
controls which parameter, you can cut the lines connecting the
two with a little knife tool that appears as you mouse over
the lines.
How well
it works
This is a pretty solid piece of software. In the couple of weeks
I've been experimenting with it, it hasn't caused me the least
bit of trouble, at least not on my G4. In other words, it didn't
crash, which is really something considering I've crashed twice
in my HTML software just while writing this review. The paint
engine performs quite well, although you will naturally see
a slowdown in performance that correlates to the size of the
brush being used.
I have only
two negative comments about this software, and they're minor
ones. First, it doesn't have multiple levels of undo. Second,
the eraser uses whatever tool you currently have selected. Often
this means you have to go back up through the brush hierarchy
to find one more appropriate for erasing. (Erasing with the
Pebble brush, for example, isn't a terribly efficient way to
erase.)
The bottom
line
Nowhouse Propeller Paint Engine is an excellent addition to
the Photoshop artist's toolbox. It provides capabilities not
found in other standalone programs, let alone Photoshop plugins.
Its tools are easy to work with and quite effective, and the
asking price of $60 is almost negligible. We give this plugin
a strong buy recommendation.
by
David Nagel
