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Photopainting: Waterlogue and Petra

5 June 2014 by Leave a Comment

I’ve been playing some more with the very excellent Waterlogue. Here area few pictures from our recent trip to Petra that have been given the treatment.

 

First glimpse of the Treasury from the Siq
One of the camels that can be ridden by visitors—not recommended these days
This tomb can been seen during the walk down Bab el-Siq to the start of the Siq itself
A hole in the top of this carved rock creates a whistling when wind blows across the opening
These steps lead away from the valley floor in Little Petra
There are four Royal Tombs in Petra, so called fro the magnificence of their carving rather than being a burial place for Nabataean kings and queens
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Photo Painting: Waterlogue

19 March 2014 by Leave a Comment

Since writing about photo painting apps some time ago—see these posts—I’ve been keeping an eye open for other interesting painting apps. I recently stumbled across Waterlogue. Waterlogue shares some of the DNA of Popsicolor as it’s a collaboration between John Balestrieri, Tinrocket and Robert Clair ChromaticBytes. This is what the authors have to say:

We wanted to come up with an easy and fast way for people to create images based on the kinds of aesthetic decisions an artist makes when he or she is painting.

The technology we developed for Waterlogue transforms your photos into spontaneous, unique, and brilliant watercolor sketches that look like real paintings. Waterlogue distills your environment down to its essence—just the way an artist would—and turns even an on-the-fly snapshot into something luminous and sublime.

We designed Waterlogue to create the most authentic and aesthetically true watercolor interpretations available, and we hope that as soon as you start using the app, you’ll start seeing the world differently.

[Read more…]

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Istanbul in Full Popsicolor

1 November 2013 by Leave a Comment

I’ve continued my love affair with Popsicolor. I’ve created a set of popsicles from photos that I took during our recent visit to Istanbul.

The Blue Mosque 1
The Blue Mosque 2
Hagia Sophia
Rüstem Pasha Mosque 1
Rüstem Pasha Mosque 2
Window Topkapi Palace
Ceiling Rose Topkapi Palace
Sweets in the Spice Bazaar
Çırağan Palace Hotel
Red House on the Bosphorus
Gatehouse on the Bosphorus
Yacht Egeria
Grand House on the Bosphorus
Shoeshine
Queen Mother Mosque
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Popsicolor Postcard Update

29 October 2013 by 1 Comment

In my last post about photo painting, I mentioned that I’d sent myself a postcard using Popsicolor’s integration with Sincerely. That postcard has now arrived. I placed the order and received an acknowledgement email on 21 October; on 23 October, I received a despatch notification; the card arrived on 28 October. It is a standard-sized postcard with what looks like a medium-glossy finish. It’s a good quality print and looks very attractive. My wife saw the card propped on a shelf and commented on its quality without knowing it was an image I had created.

The cost for this one-off postcard was USD 2.99, which I don’t think is wildly expensive. It’s possible to buy credits that reduce the cost: 249 bucks gets a price of just under USD 1.70 for an international card. The cheapest bundle is USD 9.90 and gives a unit price of USD 1.98. “Domestic”, by which I assume they mean US, costs half as much.

I think I will be using the service again.

Popsicolor - 33

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Photo Painting (5): Some More Apps

21 October 2013 by 1 Comment

I’ve been continuing my search for good and fun photo painting apps. Today’s post looks at four more.

Painteresque

Painteresque works like many of the photo painting apps: choose an image from the camera roll/albums or take a picture and then apply a style. There are eight choices (Painteresque 1 and 2, Lithograph, Coloured Pencil, Charcoal, Rainbow, Mars and Portrait) plus “do nothing” that allows you to see the original photo. The results that this app produces are pleasing, but they don’t really turn your pictures into an oil painting or watercolour, or… The effects, as you can see from the examples, are more like a filter effect. The progress messages made me chuckle, “Narrying the Wembits” and “Magic Scrooberizing”.

There are controls that allow fine-tuning on quite a number of parameters; some producing weird results, but the effect is still that of a filter. And perhaps, that’s the main problem with this app: the name does not match the product. Still, as I’ve said, the final pictures are attractive, though I suspect (but could be wrong) there are many “filter apps” that produce similar output.

A nice feature of Painteresque is that should you happen upon a combination of these settings that pleases you, it’s possible to save these as a preset.

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Photo Painting (4): More Haikus

29 September 2013 by Leave a Comment

While continuing my exploration of Haiku HD, I discovered that the developer, Jixipix Software, has a version for Mac OS X for £5.49. I got my copy from the Mac App Store, but there’s a Windows version available from the Jixipix site. As far as I can tell the desktop Haiku is almost identical to the iPad version: there is an additional adjustment, Colour Vibrancy, and images have to be dragged into the working area and selected using Finder. I load all my processed images in JPEG format into iPhoto. I found I can browse in iPhoto, and choose to reveal a selected image in Finder, which I could then drag into Haiku.

The extra space of my iMac made it easier to do some testing; so I’ve created a few samples to illustrate the possibilities of the app. It’s, by no means, exhaustive, but it does give a flavour of the output options.

Haiku Adjustments

Haiku Adjustments

  • Colour Style: specifies where the watercolour appears on the image
  • Strength: changes the opacity of the watercolour effect
  • Wet Edges: changes the size of the outline around the water-colour effect
  • Paint Fill:changes how much of the image is covered by the watercolour effect
  • Paint Variation: changes how the paint looks in the selected area
  • Ink Outlines: changes the outline of objects in the image
  • Ink Outline Detail: changes the level of detail
  • Ink Fill: increases ink amount in darker areas of the image
  • Ink Colour: changes the colour for ink outline, detail and fill (has input from pointer and RGB values)
  • Colour Vibrancy: enriches the watercolour pigment
  • Paper and Borders (not shown): choice of background (42) and borders (14)

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Photo Painting (3): More Wasted Hours

27 September 2013 by Leave a Comment

I’ve been playing some more with Haiku HD. I’m beginning to understand the effects of the various controls, but I’m still a way away from being able to anticipate the final image. As a further illustration of the app, I’ve created a gallery using some of my pictures of Barcelona’s Sagrada Família. If you haven’t visited this amazing basilica yet, you should. Put it on your bucket list. And Barcelona’s a pretty good place anyway.

I wasn’t systematic about choosing or processing images. I usually started with a preset (supplied or custom) and then tweaked until I thought, “That looks OK.” So here’s the gallery; you can find the originals somewhere here.

Exterior
Detail of Main Door
Stained Glass Rose
Organ
Matthew Icon
Tortoise
Stained Glass and Arches
Ceiling Detail
Statue
Stained Glass v1
Stained Glass v2
Stained Glass v3
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Photo Painting: How To Waste Hours (2)

26 September 2013 by Leave a Comment

Continuing from Part 1, here are some more apps I played with. One thing, I should have mentioned is that I’m only looking at iPad versions of any apps. Many of them do have iPhone versions, but I expect that I would transfer iPhone pics to the iPad for editing on the larger screen.

SketchMee HD

There is a Lite version of this app, but after playing with it for a little while, I decided to spring for the full HD. There are a number of additional features; key ones for me were the increased picture size (for export) and detail level, and the ability to save direct to the Photos Roll rather than using email or out to social media.

SketchMee Controls

SketchMee Controls

Click on a button to adjust settings. Crop and Save are obvious. Other choices affect technique (pencil/chalk, coloured/not), detail, number of shades, number of overlapped strokes, intensity of shading, tip (levels of hard to soft), paper, paper colour, colour effect and strength of effect.

Somewhere in Rhodes

Somewhere in Rhodes

SketchMee seems to me to give more realistic simulations of pencil sketches than, say, SketchGuru.

Copenhagen Harbour

Copenhagen Harbour

Coloured chalk was fun, though I can’t say how realistic the effect is.

Poppy

Poppy

 

PaintMee HD

I was sufficiently pleased with the results of Sketchmee HD that I decided to press the buy button on one of the developer’s other apps: PaintMee HD. Basic operation is the same as SketcheMee, though obviously the controls are more relevant to oil painting.

The results from PaintMee aren’t as satisfactory as SketchMee.

Somewhere in Rhodes

Somewhere in Rhodes

Copenhagen Harbour

Copenhagen Harbour

There’s not much variation in the direction of brush strokes. This is particularly obvious in the sky in the harbour scene. What works well for pencil sketches does not seem to be so good for oil paints. Compare this interpretation from AutoPainter (Frank Benson treatment):

Somewhere in Rhodes (Benson)

Somewhere in Rhodes (Benson)

 

PhotoArtista – Haiku

The last app in this post, I’ll call Haiku HD because that’s the icon label not the name in the App Store. The output from Haiku is harder to characterise than the other apps. It’s sort of watercolour, but with extra. The website calls it “… a compilation of whimsical stylistic water-colour poetically brushed to aged or artistic paper then outlined in india ink”. Haiku comes with two sets of presets— Abstract Watercolour and Stylised Watercolour—and you can create your own presets. There are sliders for strength, wet edges, paint area, paint variation, ink outline ink outline detail, ink fill, and ink colour. The effect of some of these is obvious, but others aren’t quite so straightforward, plus it seems the effects can be applied to shadows, mid-tones, high-tones or the full image.

I’ve spent some time playing with the presets and adjustments, and haven’t worked out what to expect, so I’ll just present some examples. The output from Haiku does have a certain charm.

Somewhere in Rhodes
Amsterdam At Night
Copenhagen Harbour
Tango
Poppies
Snake
In the Rockies
Vineyards at Yquem
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Photo Painting: How To Waste Hours (1)

25 September 2013 by 1 Comment

I’m not sure that “photo painting” is the correct term, but I mean the process of transforming photographs so they appear to be painted.

Yellow Mountain Scene

Yellow Mountain Scene

I started playing around having worked my way through the videos in the iPhoneography course from CreativeLIVE that I recently purchased. The course was bitchin’, to borrow one of instructor Jack Davis’ favourite words. Apart from all the usual image-taking and processing stuff, to be expected in a digital photography course, there was a session on painting apps. This got me playing around with some of the apps Jack mentioned, and looking for others. I can see that this could easily become an addiction.

These are some of the apps that I have messing with. I should say that none of the examples in this post are taken with my iPhone; they were all shot with one or other of the various digital cameras I’ve owned over the years. The pictures were all in albums in the Photos app, and imported from there into the different painting apps. By the way, you can click on any image for a larger version.

AutoPainter

I’ve installed AutoPainter HD, which is the iPad edition. There’s also a version for the iPhone. This app is the very simple to use: you only have four choices: Aquarelle, Benson, Cézanne and Van Gogh. The blurb on iTunes claims that the images are not transformed, but recreated using the artistic technique of the selection—Aquarelle is basically watercolour, the others are the actual artists. There is an option to paint a mask to increase detail in parts of the image. And that’s it.

Amsterdam Night Scene

Amsterdam Night Scene—Aquarelle

Copenhagen Harbour — Paul Cézanne

Copenhagen Harbour — Paul Cézanne

Poppy by Van Gogh

Poppy by Van Gogh

I think the results are pretty good.

Glaze

Glaze is free (at the moment) and comes with a bunch of free styles/presets (not attributed to any particular painter or technique). Additional styles can be unlocked as an in-app-purchase—60 styles is the total number. Load an image from the camera roll, and click on a style to apply it. The nice thing is that you can apply multiple styles that can be quickly compared to choose a favourite.

Tango in Buenos Aires

Tango in Buenos Aires

Some results are definitely a little wierd.

Tango 2

Tango 2

Others, not so much:

Forbidden City

Forbidden City

Apparently, it’s possible to combine styles, so the permutations are enormous. A nice feature is that final images can be saved in different sizes, including the original image resolution.

SketchGuru

This has a bunch of basic styles for pencil, coloured pencil, crayons, chalk, blah, blah, blah… There are  three siders to customise the effect (line thickness, contrast and brightness). There is a free version that has ads, but you can pay money for an ad-free version. I’m not that impressed.

Somewhere in Rhodes

Somewhere in Rhodes

You can see pencil strokes in the lower-left quadrant of the image, but the rest of the picture is more like an old-fashioned etching. Also the output is limited to a maximum of 1280×960. They won’t be getting any of my money.

More to follow…

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