Virtual Painter 5
Virtual Painter offers the following styles: Watercolor, Oil Painting, Gouache, Coloured Pencil, Pastel, Rectangle, Triangle, Impasto, Pointillism, Silk Screen, Collage, Drawing, Airbrush, Gothic Oil Painting, Embroidery, Fauvist Oil Painting.
Each of these media types can be applied to a choice of surfaces such as canvases or papers. Further tweaks can be applied to determine the amount of distortion, recolouring, focal point and scale.
The following images represent each of the media types applied to a common photographic image. You can click on any of these images to see the enlarged version. In the enlarged version you will be able to view the details and textures that the effect has achieved.

WatercolorOil paintingGouacheColoured PencilPastelRectagleTriangleImpasto

PointillismSilk ScreenCollageDrawingAirbrushGothic OilEmbroideryFauvist Oil

One of the virtual painter's shortcomings is its lack of brightness/contrast or threshold settings that could be used to determine how highlights and shadows are rendered. The highlights on the upper half of the subjects face have been exaggerated by some of these effects due to the reduced tonal range appropriate to the chosen media. The only way to correct this would be to adjust the tonal qualities of your photograph prior to applying the effect and then tweak it further if this should fail to satisfy. This trial and error approach may prove time consuming.
These shortcomings aside, Virtual Painter is a very easy way to achieve your conversions. There is practically nothing to learn when you begin to use this application and the results are more than adequate for high-street consumers.
There are marked differences between this version and version 4 of Virtual Painter. Some people preferred the results obtained using the older version and consequently, they re-released VP4 as Virtual Painter Classic.

Akvis Sketch doesn't have the variety of styles that is available in Virtual Painter; it's simply a photo-to-sketch converter. What this plug-in lacks in variety is amply compensated for by the quality of the effects. With a minimum of input you can create a sketch from a photograph that looks as though you have spent some time creating it. This attribute allows you to command a higher price for the work or at least allows you to sleep at night in the knowledge that you're not selling garbage. The adjustable parameters allow you to vary the angle of the strokes, the stroke length, the intensity of the midtones and the degree to which cross-hatching is applied to the midtones. There's a charcoal effect parameter though increasing this slider tends to render a more computer generated looking image. A watercolor slider allows you to effectively soften the strokes giving you a less severe and lower contrast image. The coloration slider introduces the colours from the source photograph and, when used sparingly, lends the image a certain pastel quality. All parameter levels can be saved as a preset which means you don't have to remember your favorite settings and this may prove valuable for batch processing too. With the release of version 6.0 comes the addition of textured backgrounds that add a more natural appearance to your finished product.
Click on the thumbnail image to reveal the enlarged version.

Snap Art from Alien Skin offers ten basic styles as illustrated below. These styles can be adjusted via numerous parameters to such a degree that the style itself can be radically altered which effectively provides you with a greater number of styles than the ten filters imply. There are several presets for each style so that you can see what each is capable of without having to play around with the numerous sliders. Once you've found a preset that you like, you can then tweak various parameters in order to achieve more precise results. You can alter the brush size, stroke length, paint thickness, coverage, surface characteristic, colour and tonal qualities and various other setting particular to your chosen medium. Your settings can then be added to the existing presets for that style.

Color Pencil Comic Impasto Oil Painting Pastel Pen & Ink Pencil Sketch Pointillism Stylize Watercolor
The included presets and the ability to further tweak numerous parameters means that you can achieve good quality results from the outset yet still posses the functionality to refine your output once you've become more familiar with the software.

PhotoArtMaster is not a plug-in but a standalone application. It allows you to apply several effects to an image and combine them manually using a choice of brushes. This approach requires more investment of time on the users part but the results can be more unique. However, as the other applications reviewed here are of the plug-in variety you could employ these same methods using those filters by simply combining different layers on photoshop.
Unfortunately 'Fo2Pix' the company that developed this application went into liquidation in November 2007 and the software is currently unavailable. Perhaps one of the many plug-in developers will take this package onboard and turn it into something a little more intuitive and user friendly. You can still find copies available online though we can hardly recommend buying it until another company takes over its development.

Click on this image to view the enlarged version.