Posts in Category: PicsArt
3/10/2012: Bougainvillea Photopaints
Over on Google+ where I am active ( +Stephen Ingraham) there is quite a large group of photographer/artists who are expressing their visions of the world by creating painterly renderings of photographs. Quite a few of them use Pixelbender within PhotoShop. I use Dynamic Auto Painter 64x Pro, which is a program that attempts to mimic the effects of different classic painters by analyzing your photograph down to basic shapes and colors and applying the master’s brush methods to recreate it as a painting. It is a fascinating program to watch work, as it builds your image from a bare canvas, one brush stroke at a time.
I also do some finger-painting on my Xoom’s touch screen, using PicsArt Studio to selectively apply various effects with my finger tip, and then PS Touch to add a texture layer or to do final processing.
My offering today is a gallery of examples based on the same photograph…a sprig of bougainvillea against a terra-cotta brick wall at Mission Bay in San Diego. This is a shot that I actually took with painterly processing in mind. I liked the color and texture contrast as a photograph…but I was definitely thinking of it as a painting when I pressed the shutter release. The original looks like this.
The first image (at the top) is done in the style of Van Gogh. Following, we have the same same photograph rendered after a Matisse’s Lily Pond, followed by the same pic again, this time rendered after a work of Cezanne.
Finally we have the same pic again, finger-painted on the Xoom using various effects in PicsArt Studio, with a photo-texture layer (macro of a pocket handkerchief) overlaid in PS Touch.
Clearly, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so what do you think? I will chime back in if comments warrant it 🙂
2/28/2012: Finger Paintings (PhotoArt?)
This image of a young raccoon began life as a digiscoped capture taken in Acadia National Park on a bird walk. I have been playing with art apps on my Xoom Tablet, which runs Android. There are now 400,000 apps in the Android Market, and quite a few art apps, specifically designed to do almost anything you might want to do to a photograph. PicsArt Studio is one, and it has some interesting painterly effects: oil, pastel, watercolor, hdr…as well as the more usual adjustments to contrast, sharpness, saturation, etc. The thing about working on a touch screen device like the Xoom Tablet is that you can quickly and easily finger paint the effects over exactly the portions of the image you want, leaving other portions untouched, or painting a completely different effect over other areas. In PicsArt you can also control the intensity of the effect, the size of the brush, the hardness of the brush, etc. so you have very fine control. It is all very experiential…very trial and error (mostly error of course), and very direct and immediate because of the touch interface. It is hard to predict what will happen when you apply an effect, but since it is all digital, experimentation is quick and easy to undo. You learn as you go. And it is, honestly, as much fun as finger painting!
This image used a combination of Pastel effect for the background, watercolor for the raccoon, which was then over-painted with the sharpen effect. It gives it the look of an ink drawing.
For this second image, also from Acadia National Park, I used PicsArt Studio to selectively apply (finger paint) watercolor, pastel, contour, and sharpen effects. I added a Mask effect to create the boarder. That image was saved as a jpeg. I then opened it in PS Touch (PS=PhotoShop) and created an empty layer set to overlay. I then chose Add Camera Fill and took a close up of a canvas bag with the Xoom’s back camera. I applied sharpening to that overlay and adjusted the Opacity to taste, so that the pattern of the cloth appears as the surface of the image, as though it were painted on canvas. (The effect is subtle. You may need to click the image and open it full sized to see it. Finally I exported the finished image as another jpeg.
This whole process, because of the very tactile nature of the Xoom touch interface, and the freedom of the digital media, is very like doodling. Is it art? Is it painting? It certainly is no longer photography, but I am having fun with it.
One last example. A Texas Hill Country Sunset. Finger painted in PicsArt Studio and finished in PS Touch on the Xoom Tablet. Here the canvas texture is more pronounced.
