Deep Paint... hmmm...
Keith Clark
Shimizu Kahei wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Well, I've read the DP hype, and there seem to be two
> possibilities:
>
> 1 -- It's an application with all the natural media of
> Painter, but with the superior usability and reliability of Photoshop.
>
> 2 -- It's just a photoshop plugin that does impasto and a few
> crayons.
>
> From the marketing ick that's available now, it is absolutely
> impossible to tell which it is...
>
> Has anyone got any reliable information on just how powerful
> it *really* is?
>
> Kahei
Download their free demo and try it for yourself. :> It's fully functional
and works for two weeks.
If you don't want to mess with answering their form questions to download,
you can also get the demo from http://www.download.com
It's BOTH a standalone app and a Photoshop plug-in.
I don't advise using it as a Photoshop plugin. DP takes huge amount of
memory to run. Save your work as TIFF files from DP in stages if you need
to and then import them as layers in Photoshop. It may be quicker.
It does much more than a few crayons. I don't have an exact count of the
number of tools, but it's a very wide selection.
Put it this way...I downloaded their demo and bought the CD after a week
of using it.
Cheers,
Keith Clark (Nature Photographer)
http://www.clarkphoto.com/
Damian
found the
brusing to be very slow, especially when running as a plug-in.
I have painter and other paint apps but now use Satori as my preferred
paint, compo and editing software. If you have not heard about this yet then
this will only be a matter of tme.
The softest, fastest brushes you will see on any platform at any price. All
the brushes, shapes and operation are freely editable/scaleable objects but
they are so fast and freeform that you think that your using a pixel-pusher.
You only realise how powerful the package is when you comp several 100MB+
images and layer blend them using
10,000+ pixel soft airbrush in real-time.
Get a download at www.satoripant.com
You should really chek this software out to see the future of graphics
software and the beginning of the end for pixel-pushers. I am sure that the
big developers are already beggining to take note of this product. Get it
while you can!
Damien.
Dam...@ukf.net
Shimizu Kahei wrote in message <374a854e...@nnrp.gol.com>...
Shimizu Kahei
<ClarkPho...@spiritone.com> wrote:
>
>
>Shimizu Kahei wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> Well, I've read the DP hype, and there seem to be two
>> possibilities:
>>
>> 1 -- It's an application with all the natural media of
>> Painter, but with the superior usability and reliability of Photoshop.
>>
>> 2 -- It's just a photoshop plugin that does impasto and a few
>> crayons.
>>
>> From the marketing ick that's available now, it is absolutely
>> impossible to tell which it is...
>>
>> Has anyone got any reliable information on just how powerful
>> it *really* is?
>>
>> Kahei
>
>Download their free demo and try it for yourself. :> It's fully functional
>and works for two weeks.
>
There must be some good reason this didn't occur to me :)
>If you don't want to mess with answering their form questions to download,
>you can also get the demo from http://www.download.com
>
>It's BOTH a standalone app and a Photoshop plug-in.
>
>I don't advise using it as a Photoshop plugin. DP takes huge amount of
>memory to run. Save your work as TIFF files from DP in stages if you need
>to and then import them as layers in Photoshop. It may be quicker.
>
>It does much more than a few crayons. I don't have an exact count of the
>number of tools, but it's a very wide selection.
>
>Put it this way...I downloaded their demo and bought the CD after a week
>of using it.
>
Mm. Well, it certainly excels at gooey oil paint effects.
The big problem I had with it was that performance is *so* awful --
on my p2-400 with half a gig of RAM, rooming or rotating even an
800*600 image seems to be a MAJOR task for it! This makes it
unusable. On a 2500*2500 image, the smallest I can work with, even
drawing a simple brush stroke produces laggy, jerky movement.
Is it just me who has this problem? Does it not like my PC, or is it
really that slow?
Kahei
Keith Clark
I'll be upgrading to 512 MB next week, but that will not resolve all the
slowness.
I fed them a wish list of things I would like tweaked and improved, with speed
right near the top. The immediately wrote back, asked for my phone number and
said a programmer would call me. From New Zealand. I'm impressed...!
Yes, I agree about the slowness.
But essentially you're working in 3D in real-time.
If would be nice if there was a way to turn off the rendering of the bump
channel in real time or something. Maybe that would help with the speed.
It's faster than painting or cloning in Photoshop though!
Like I said, I don't recommend using DP with Photoshop as a plugin unless you
only work on "web sized" images. Don't even think of using it with less than
128 MB.
Cheers!
Keith
Martina Weber
<ClarkPho...@spiritone.com> wrote:
>
>Like I said, I don't recommend using DP with Photoshop as a plugin unless you
>only work on "web sized" images. Don't even think of using it with less than
>128 MB.
>
Oh my goodness - I can second this ! Felt so good when I upgraded my
humble pc to 96 MB ram last winter -- but with DP it is like painting
with the toes behind the back --
I am playing with my still running demo version -- and wanted to paint
a quite simple design like a still life -- and it was so
sloooooooooooow. The dotted lines indicating where _I_ was were miles
ahead to those painted lines where the computer was...
If Right Hemisphere will get the product faster I will certainly buy
it - but up to now it is far to slow for me ( or my pc)
Guess what - I pulled out my acrylics box and made this order in
"real paint" this time.
best regards,
Martina
***
Martina Weber
"Chatelaine"
Design and Needlearts
Duisburg/Germany
*********************************************************
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Keith Clark
Martina Weber wrote:
Was it thrashing your hard drive as you were painting? If it was using the hard
drive then more memory will help.
I don't recommend running it under NT if you only have 96 MB.
How fast is your PC? It's at least a Pentium II, right?
I'm using a 450 MHz machine and on images or 2400x3000 pixels it's reasonably fast
when doing actual painting with average sized brushes.
It's changing views, zooming in, saving, etc that seems to take the longest.
Here's a thought... If you adjust the lighting so there is NO specular light, and
only the ambient source, it may not try to render the bump channel. I haven't
tried that. See if that makes it faster when painting.
Cheers,
Keith
Keith Clark
sized so they load fast and show reasonable detail.
http://www.clarkphoto.com/ (click on the "Paintings" button)
Shimizu Kahei
<ClarkPho...@spiritone.com> wrote:
With me, it never touches the hard drive at all, and performance is
still horrible. What particularly bothers me is that performance
sucks not only when painting (which there is *some* excuse for, as it
is basically running an 'emboss' on the area just painted), but when
zooming, which shouldn't be any harder for it than for any other
program. I'm going to leave it alone until they improve performance
enough that I can paint fluidly, without frequent enforced pauses for
thought :)
One thing I really like about it, though, is the blending and
smearing. When I gave up and went back into painter, I really missed
that luscious, gooey smear (and I also missed the proper handling of
transparent layers :I ). There's a lot of potential here if they'd
fix the performance...
Martina Weber
<ClarkPho...@spiritone.com> wrote:
>Was it thrashing your hard drive as you were painting? If it was using the hard
No - it was none of the painting programms which made my HD crash - it
was a mix of Netscape and my embroidery software -- both can't stand
each other as it seems.
The hard drive does not work yet when I use the Painter or Deep Paint
- so I think for my miniature work the RAM is sufficient.
>
>Here's a thought... If you adjust the lighting so there is NO specular light, and
>only the ambient source, it may not try to render the bump channel. I haven't
>tried that. See if that makes it faster when painting.
Thanks for that tip - I will try it just in a few minutes.....
Keith Clark
texture rendering. He said that disabling the specular source would not matter, and he
appears to be right.
I still don't have problems with painting slowness, at least with relatively small
brushes. But use brushes above 100 pixels, and yes, it dogs.
One workaround (although it seems time consuming) would be work on a smaller image
when you need to use a large brush (since with a large brush you don't care about
detail), then use Photoshop to scale it up to a larger size and then go in with a
finer brush to create the detailed areas last? But that's just a suggestion, and I
haven't tried it yet.
But saving in DP format, and zooming, as other people have said, is definitely a
bottleneck, But, I like the effects so much I put up with it. I'm sure they'll make
improvements. These guys are really eager. I think there's going to lots of good press
about them.
BTW, you mentioned watercolors, right? I've found that the choice of brushes and also
the various brush settings make a lot of difference with the way Deep Paint renders
watercolor effects.
I've done some hand painted watercolor effects with Photoshop (not easy, and not as
good as a real paint program) that have been really popular, so I'm anxious to do more
with DP and watercolor... I also just re-installed Painter Classic so I can compare
the two (hey, it was free, and the full Painter is a lot! ;>).
Here's one I made with Photoshop...(yes, it started with a scan of one of my slides).
http://www.clarkphoto.com/paintings/dp/OldMill.jpg
When I finish a watercolor one with DP that I like, I'll submit it for your
critique...?
Cheers,
Keith
PS hope you don't mind me sending this to your email also, but I'm on a different
computer today with a bad newsfeed.
Allen
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Allen Harkleroad
Internet EYE Magazine
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MS ID: 244813
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Keith Clark <ClarkPho...@spiritone.com> wrote in message
news:374D7543...@spiritone.com...