Get Your Artistic Groove On with 400+ Filters

PostworkShop Artist Edition is a post processing product for your images. It is designed as an image manipulation instrument, easy to use by both novices and professional users. Graphic designers and photographers can use it to apply a slew of effects and styles to transform images into digital artistry.

Artist Edition is one of the three editions of PostworkShop available from Xycod, and comes for the price of $49. The set of features it sports is not the richest, but it comes close to the pro version of the application, since the only differences consist in the lack of a 64-bit build, the plug in mod and batch processing video and animation.

Despite these minuses, Artist Edition is a strong build which puts at your disposal more than 400s styles, the possibility to mix them up into beautiful results as well as the choice to create your own effects.

Before proceeding to installing the application you should know that it works with a minimum of 2GB of RAM, while the recommendation is for double the amount. It is a professional instrument and, as such, requires quite powerful machines for the fastest results.

Installation is not at all difficult and there is nothing that can go wrong. At one point you have to choose if you want plug-in functionality, but this is supported only by the Pro edition of the application.



The Mac layout of the interface may not seem familiar to Windows users and some may even feel uncomfortable; but once you get by this feeling you’ll notice that there is nothing wrong with the frame, and it is just a matter of adjusting yourself to it.

PostworkShop makes available the same frame for all its editions, the features and options being the only differences between them. In the upper part you have access to the Compositing tab, the Style Editor, which allows you to create new effects.

The third tab in the main application window is Bitmap Editor. This is designed to offer you some basic drawing tools and help you paint directly on the canvas. It features 3 sets of brushes (algorithmic, scanned and brush family), each containing an incredible amount of choices. Also, you can download new sets from the downloads section of the developer’s website.

The settings area in the Bitmap Editor lets you customize the brush you chose down to its size, opacity level, roundness, angle or dynamics. Of course, the options available depend on the type of brush you decided to use. Paint mode sports addition tools such as color picker, pan tool, zoom options and color filler.

In order to obtain beautiful results in PostworkShop Artist Edition you have to combine the styles it makes available by layering them on the original picture. Most of them come with adjusting settings so that they can be tweaked up. Layers can also be modified in terms of blending mode and opacity, giving you an ample range of transformations to operate with.

The core of the application is represented by the styles it puts at your disposal. And this second version of the product brings an increased number of effects to mix up, over 400. These are ordered into five main categories (Building blocks, Drawing, Painting, Graphic arts and Photo), each sheltering a wide variety of sub-classes and selections.

One of the best parts concerning the styles is that each of them is listed with a thumbnail which gives you a hint about their effect. Stacking them up gives you a nice perspective of the project’s layer structure, visible especially in the Style Editor window.

As its name suggests, PostworkShop is tailored to be used as post-processing tool to give the finishing touches for your images or to easily create new artwork by applying ready-made professional filtering. The individual choices are vast and the fact that you can mix them together and tweak the styles up makes from the product an incredible instrument for digital imaging.

The functionality of the product extends to novices looking to create impressing images as well as seasoned CG artists in search for a quick and productive way to deliver complex layer mixes. The application may seem a bit daunting at the beginning but once you start using it you’ll realize that it is intuitive and easy to handle.



The Good

The amount of preset filters and the possibilities deriving from combining them are overwhelming. Achieving a new style is extremely easy as all you have to do is layer the styles onto each other.

You have the possibility to save the new style and share it with the PostworkShop community or use it in other projects. The Style Editor allows you to configure and edit styles as well as view the schematics of the layers.

The Bad

Although Paint module brings in an impressive collection of brushes it lacks plenty of drawing and retouching tools.

The Truth

PostworkShop Artist Edition is extremely easy to handle and produces amazing results. The suite of filters is larger with each version, practically making unlimited the number of styles you can use.

As a post processing image manipulation tool it manages to offer artists a quick and easy way to achieve beautiful results. Also, the rich filter repository permits more experience users with a keen eye to create complex new filters.