Creating Bold or Subtle Path Effects in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop CS3 Faster
Ever wanted to create path effects in a fraction of the time it takes when doing it with Illustrator’s or Photoshop’s native tools? Then Path Styler Pro from Shiny Core may be something for you. This plug-in for both Illustrator and Photoshop makes plastic, glass, metal or other materials text and objects in a snap.
Path Styler Pro is available for Mac OS X and Windows. It installs as a plug-in to Illustrator and/or Photoshop. In Adobe Illustrator, you start Path Styler Pro after having created some object—a text snippet, a circle or square. Path Styler Pro can be started as a Live Effect. In Effect mode, the results can be turned off quite easily, and even with the rasterisation, the effect is resolution-independent.
In Photoshop, Path Styler Pro requires you to first create a path. When working on text, this means that you will first have to convert text to a working path. As soon as that’s been done, you can create your effects in Path Styler Pro.
Great Time Saver
Both versions of the plug-in behave totally identical, which is great news for training and learning; you’ll only have to learn this plug-in once and be able to use it in Illustrator as well as in Photoshop. Of course, the effects that you create in Path Styler Pro can be created without the plug-in as well. The crux of the matter therefore is: is it worth the money?
One of my favourite criteria is the time you can save using a specific tool. With Path Styler Pro, I would say you can save a lot of time, even if you’re an expert designer. The plug-in simply offers a dedicated interface to only one task: applying various effects to paths. The four light sources that you can set up, for example, allow you to create very subtle effects in no time.
I would estimate that Path Styler Pro will save time in an order of magnitude of 25% to 75%, depending on your level of expertise. The only disadvantage is that all your results will be rasterized, which makes t difficult to scale your art up later in the workflow. The one thing you therefore really must count in from the beginning is the maximum scale at which you think your art will be used. That absolute maximum scale is the one you’ll have to work in if you want to enjoy the time savings to the fullest.
A second criterion is what the effects amount to. Well, you can create terribly ugly stuff with Path Styler Pro, and in the hands of someone who thinks plastic buttons are the next big thing, the results could hurt the eye. But in the hands of a skilled designer (or someone with good taste and enough stamina to learn how to work with the plug-in), Path Styler Pro offers the ability to create truly subtle effects.
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More Intuitive To Use
One of the things I tried was creating a glass ball in Illustrator using Path Styler Pro and using Illustrator’s mesh gradient tool. Now I know how the latter works in theory, but I’ve never been able to create decent looking three-dimensional effects with it. I know how it should look, I can draw it on paper, but I simply fail to grasp the exact steps to make that same look appear in Illustrator.
With Path Styler Pro, I didn’t have that problem. The reason is that I do understand why a ball looks like it does—it’s the light, the reflection and refraction, and all those other physics things. Illustrator expects me to convert those physics things in my mind, into the way Illustrator works. Path Styler Pro expects me to know the physics thing, and how to set the lights, the colours and the amounts of reflection and refraction in order to get the result I want.
In one word, Path Styler Pro is just a little bit more like drawing and painting with a pen and pencil, while Illustrator requires me to know more about how its (powerful; no question about that) tools work in order to get specific results.
The end-result for me is that in Path Styler Pro I can create a subtle glass ball in a matter of minutes, while in Illustrator I struggle with that same ball for half a day to get it more or less right. I can imagine I’m not alone, so I think a lot of people who are designing but love to work with the physics rather than with the vectors, will love Path Styler Pro. For three-dimensional effects, it’s either that or an expensive 3D application.
Given the fact that Path Styler Pro does indeed have all the bells and whistles any designer could hope for in order to create multiple bold or subtle path effects applied to the same object, I truly believe it is worth every penny, especially as it helps you accomplish a task faster than with the host program by itself.
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