February 2014 - Digital Group - Auto Painting

Meeting Notes March 2009 to 2018.
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spb
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Joined: Tue Mar 25, 2008 7:04 pm

February 2014 - Digital Group - Auto Painting

Post by spb » Sat Feb 08, 2014 6:47 pm

PHOTOSHOP ELEMENTS DISTILLED
I have received many requests for notes to accompany the Photoshop Elements beginners tutorials that I give at the APS Digital Group and I am pleased to report that these are now available to download from the Digital Group page of the APS website. There are eight short documents to correspond to the eight tutorials.

Many thanks to Peter Wardman who dusted off his document editing skills and brought my original 2008 tuition notes up to date. I should emphasise that these are not intended to be comprehensive but rather to be extremely concise and to contain only the key skills needed to master Photoshop Elements. Fat, indigestible, textbooks are written on Photoshop but we have attempted to distil it all down to two pages on each of eight topics! The software is evolving all the time and comments are always welcome on the content of these notes.

NEWS
Nicolaus Wegner has spent 14 months and driven 20,000 miles to capture a series of stunning timelapse sequences of his native Wyoming. These inspirational films have to be seen to be believed; day and night in the most spectacular weather.

The Smart Lens concept pioneered by the Sony QX100 and QX10 seems to be catching on with products from Vivitar, Polaroid and Kodak. The principle is to marry a high quality lens + sensor combination to a smartphone processor and screen to produce a hybrid phone-camera which by-passes the phone's internal camera entirely. The smart-lens links to the phone wirelessly. I think that an enthusiast compact would be a faster and more flexible bet, but it's an interesting concept.

dpReview has published an interesting comparison of images from today's best camera-phones and best DSLR (below $2000) vs a Nikon FM2 with Fuji Velvia 50 and four of the best Canon DSLRs from 2003 to 2007. The results are surprisingly close. The current Nikon D800 is the champion but the iPhone 5S out-shoots the earlier Canons and the Nokia Lumia 1020 out-resolves them. The Velvia film grain seems dominant by modern standards. In low light the phones are at a disadvantage but the author reckons that most shortcomings can be overcome with more processing power and they are only maybe 6 years behind the current champion. Sales of phones are rocketing and camera sales are plummeting. Which technology would you invest in?

PHOTO PAINTING
Photo painting is a process by which software converts a photo into a pseudo painting by creating brush strokes that follow the colours and contours of the original image. Whilst this is unlikely to impress artists or die-hard photographic traditionalists, it can have a place in creative work and for family projects.

There are many software packages on the market which attempt photo painting but after some research, I have purchased two;

Corel Painter Essentials 4. (£40)
Corel Painter is a long standing and fiendishly deep digital drawing and painting application - the artist's equivalent to Photoshop for photographers. Corel Painter Essentials 4 is the current incarnation of a much simplified version and which also includes a photo-painting capability. The controls are very simple - just pick from a list of 19 painting or drawing styles and click 'Start'. The presets can be further modified by choosing alternative edges, palettes, papers and brushes if required. It should be noted that this is a very different (and much slower) process than simply choosing a filter in Photoshop, because the program attempts to mimic an artist's brush strokes and colour choices, whilst blending these into ever-finer detail as the process runs over several minutes. A Restore Detail brush can undo the brush strokes in areas of the image where too much detail has been lost.

Dynamic Auto Painter (£31 or £62)
This is a more sophisticated application which requires much more investment in time and skill to get the best from it. However it is capable of more varied and (arguably!) realistic results. There are many controls and settings which need to be mastered for best results but there is an excellent forum for DAP users where paintings and helpful hints are posted. Users have also posted additional style-packs (called AOPs) which add many further styles and effects - some impressive and some deeply weird. Where DAP tries to slavishly copy a well-known painter's style, it can be laughable (Van Gogh is probably the worst) but the looser impressionistic styles can be appealing.

The resolution of DAP paintings are independent of the original image, which means that highly detailed paint strokes can result from tiny thumbnail images, if required. Areas of the image can be marked for more or less detailed attention and the program can be left to run for hours, if required.

Both of these programs benefit from post-processing the output in Photoshop - the painted version is not necessarily the end in itself. For example blending the painting with the original image or adding a separate line-drawing to a painting to add edge definition may both give interesting results. Judging from the forum, many enthusiasts have lost chunks of their lives to perfecting such techniques.

The auto-painting process covers detailed flaws in the original image so skies can be changed or picture elements removed with a minimum of skill and without visible consequences! However, the process will not hide fundamental faults in composition or lighting.

Cheers, Steve Brabner

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