Horse Races

[DannyRaphael]

I've just begun tinkering with a program called Studio Artist which has a lot of possibilities. Up until a few months ago Studio Artist was Mac only. Recently released Version 4 runs on PCs too. See http://synthetik.com/

This interpretation is based on a couple factory presets: Cartoon3 and Water which I layered and sharpened in Photoshop.

[DannyRaphael]

A couple more using Studio Artist's Water preset...

The first was a result of a single layer rendition, letting Studio Artist "autopaint" until it finished. This one looks "painted" to me, but not much like a watercolor.

The second was built from multiple images and stacked in a single image in Photoshop. Each image was rendered by SA using the same preset applied for 15-20 seconds. In Photoshop the blend mode of the individual layers was set to Darken. A little sharpening was applied after merging the layers. This one looks more like a "watercolor" to me.

[Steve Conway]

At $400.00 a pop, me thinks one better have a source for selling your work when using this program.

WOW!

Steve C.

[DannyRaphael]

Originally Posted by Steve Conway

At $400.00 a pop, me thinks one better have a source for selling your work when using this program.

WOW!

Steve C.

You raise a good point.

As recently as last week Synthetic Software was offering an end of the year 25% discount purchase incentive, but even so the price would not be trivial for the casual user.

Although I've barely gotten into using it, my take so far is that the primary audience would be folks engaged in profit-making endeavors such as high end graphic design and/or video production moreso than casual digital artists (like me) who mostly tinker as a hobby.

Although it can be used like a traditional "artistic plugin" its scope of functionality goes far beyond that. To be honest at this point I don't understand all that it can do and how/why one would need various functions, but the demo videos were quite eye opening.

I can say SA's autopainting is more robust/flexible than Corel Painter and it has record/script-like capabilities (similar conceptually to Photoshop actions) that can be used to achieve consistent results from image to image as well as applying the same effect to each frame of a digital movie.

It has (literally) hundreds of options/tuning knobs/parameters with unlimited customization and automation possibilities, kind of like Impressionist on major steroids.

My intent is to post a review sometime down the road. Stay tuned...

[lkroll]

I still remember the Steve Jobs object mosaic that was created using SA. I don't know of any other program that can automate this process (and not sure it was all automagically created in SA either, but the artist touts that that was the program he used to create it). Seen some other object mosaics created by SA too (other artists) and they are quite unique and fantastic to say the least. But, alas, like Lucis, I won't be getting this way too expensive for me gem. I'll continue to try to fake it by other means.

[Alcar]

Nice work, Danny. At $400 its out of my league too. Here's one using DAP for under-paint and the Impressionist Plugin for the final.
Alan

[lkroll]

Now that this has made it back and I am motivated again, thought I would take PostworkShop Pro out for a spin once again for this result (blended with a myriad of other GIMPy things).

[FranS]

Nice work, Lyle. I like the effect. Do you remember what presets you used in PostworkShop?

Fran

[lkroll]

Glad you liked the result Fran. Used G'MIC's Paint preset to start things off (pre simplification step), then I used PostworkShop Pro's Brown and Red preset w/ Tonemapping (created a custom preset by adding tone mapping slider in front; easy to create custom presets in PwS) with gain set to -45 (negative 45; this is my default by the way since I like that result for whatever reason with this setting for most renders that I do). I then blend it back in GIMP (could do all the blending in PwS, but my crutch is GIMP of course).

[alexmeta]

Another trying to watercolor (old version + smudge)

[FranS]

Lyle, thanks for your reply. I'm going to have to spend some time learning a little more about PostworkShop.

Alex, beautiful rendition. I really like the colors you've achieved. Actually, I really like everything about it.

Fran

[lkroll]

Still on one of my many binges of late.

[frate]

I like watching your binges. This mosaic binge is most interesting. What is the process, particularly the wandering mosaics?

[lkroll]

Hey frate; what's your definition of the Wandering Mosaic. If you mean the one here, I mentioned some hints at link below.

http://www.gimpchat.com/viewtopic.ph...&t=3628#p45308