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 🙂