Interested in turning photographs into works of digital art, such as cartoons, charcoal drawings, ink drawings, oil paintings, pastel drawings, and watercolors? Here are brief descriptions of some key software tools for desktop computers. Unless otherwise noted they work in Photoshop as plug-ins.
FotoSketcher is a versatile free standalone Windows program that allows you to create drawings, paintings, and a few other effects. It can transform photos into cartoons, oil paintings, oil pastel drawings, pen and ink drawings, pencil drawings, watercolor paintings. and other types of artworks. It is standalone freeware.
Sliders and other controls for each effect allow you modify image rendition. For example, for the oil pastel sketch effect you can control minimum stroke size, maximum stroke size, number of iterations, edge intensity, and filter precision. You can also soften edges, add a frame, add texture, add text, and use a retouch brush. There is a small preview window in the floating control panel.
Snap Art is a full-featured Windows/Mac plug-in/standalone program that allows you to easily create charcoal drawings, color pencil drawings, comics, crayon drawings. impasto paintings, oil paintings, pastel drawings (including hard, oil, and soft pastel), pen and ink drawings, pencil sketches, Pointillism paintings, stylized illustrations, and watercolor paintings.
There are a variety of presets for each effect, and slider controls for background (e.g,, for oil paint: brush size, photorealism, coverage, stroke length, and color variation), detail masking (similar controls as background), colors (e.g., brightness, contrast, and saturation), lighting (e.g., angle, direction, and highlight characteristics as well as vignette effect), and canvas effects (e.g, pastel paper). You can create your own presets. The ability to close side-panel controls permits a large preview space.
Dynamic Auto-Painter, a Windows/Mac stand-alone program, allows you to paint in the style of famous painters, such as Paul Czanne, Claude Monet, and Vincent van Gogh. It allows you to create a wide variety of types of artworks.
There are a variety of controls for each preset, such as brush strokes, canvas, detail brushes, faithfulness, realism, palette, and quality. It supports advanced (e.g, color shift), retouch, outline, canvas, material, color, and layer adjustments. It is highly customizable. Artwork rendering occurs in stages, with further user fine-tuning possible during some stages. It typically renders vivid, saturated images, but image saturation can be adjusted.
While the presets can be used to easily create artworks, the real power of this program is not revealed until you start using the numerous advanced controls and directing brush strokes during the creation process. As the program typically makes very dramatic changes to images, you are likely to experiment with a number of adjustments to get desired effects. To start, you may want to try the Acry-Real or Aqua-Real effects, which create more realistic images.
It is highly recommended that you download and test digital art software demos prior to purchase. Try all the presets. A software company's idea of what a good art effect is may not match your own, so experiment with changing the settings of unsatisfactory effects before concluding that the program cannot do what you want.
It is especially important to test the limits of a program and to determine what features can be disabled. For example, see how much detail you can get in a painting and check whether it is possible to turn off the texture effect (i.e, canvas).
Digital artist Charles W. Bailey, Jr. transforms public domain and personal photographs into noncommercial digital artworks using specialized Photoshop plug-ins and art programs. He has made over 600 digital artworks freely available under versions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licenses, providing detailed information about how each artwork was created.
PERM, Russia, Nov. 18, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- AKVIS announces the major update of AKVIS ArtWork, photo to painting software with a wide variety of artistic effects. Version 12.0 brings the accelerated effects, new tools, improved Batch Processing and Text features; provides compatibility with macOS Catalina and recently updated image editors; offers support for more RAW files, bug fixes, and better program stability.
AKVIS ArtWork makes it easy to perform digital art. The software perfectly imitates the most popular painting and drawing techniques: Oil Painting, Watercolor, Gouache, Comics, Pen & Ink, Linocut, Pastel, and Pointillism. The program turns a photo into a mind-blowing piece of art. Recreate the magic of the painting with AKVIS ArtWork!
The Pen & Ink style offers new post-processing tools for adding the finishing touches to your paintings. Besides, the recent version includes the enhanced Batch Processing option with the new file renaming feature, and the possibility to freely position the Text/Watermark in images. The new features foster greater creativity and inspiration.
AKVIS ArtWork Home sells for $72.00. Deluxe and Business versions with more effects and tools are also available for sophisticated users and commercial clients. Consult the official website akvis.com for more details about license types and prices of the software.
AKVIS (akvis.com) specializes in the development of photo & video processing software. Since the company's launch in 2004, it has released a wide selection of successful products for Windows and Mac. The company always keeps up with the times and updates its products with cutting-edge technologies.
Previously a separate product, Impression has just been merged with Topaz Studio 2, a powerful full-featured photo editor. It is a very powerful and highly customizable tool for transforming photos and other images into a wide variety of digital artworks, such as drawings and paintings. Topaz Studio 2 can be run as a stand-alone product or as a Photoshop plug-in. Topaz Studio 2 is resource intensive and it has minimum hardware and OpenGL requirements. Topaz Studio 2 is frequently updated, and the below description may not reflect the state of the product when you read this. It is important to download and test this program prior to purchase.
Impression has a number of presets (called looks), including chalk, charcoal, colored pencil, da Vinci drawing, Degas, Edward Hooper, Impressionist, palette knife, Pointillism, Renoir, pencil, sketch, van Gough, watercolor, and other effects. Studio 2 uses layers, and the selected Impression look name appears in the upper right. Below the name is the Impression layer where the look controls are.
Impression has a cornucopia of controls, and each control can be customized by applying the look, selecting the Impression layer, and then clicking on the down arrow. The real power of impression is not evident until you start using these controls. Here are some key adjustments:
FotoSketcher is a versatile standalone Windows program that allows you to create drawings, paintings, and a few other effects. It can transform photos into cartoons, oil paintings, oil pastel drawings, pen and ink drawings, pencil drawings, watercolor paintings. and other types of artworks. It is freeware.
AKVIS Sketch is a Windows/Mac plug-in/standalone program that allows you to create drawings and watercolors. It offers a very wide variety of effects, such as charcoal, color pencil, lead pencil, pastel, and watercolor. The effects are organized into two groups: classic and artistic.
Sliders allow you to fine-tune these effects. For example, using the detailed sketch effect and the strokes panel, you can adjust pencil color and background color; alter stroke angle, thickness, and length; and control midtones hatching and intensity. Using the edges panel, you can alter sensitivity, edge width, and zone of influence. With the effects panel, you can adjust panel, shadows, noise, and contrast.
AKVIS OilPaint is a Windows/Mac plug-in/standalone program that allows you to create oil paintings and oil pastel drawings You can alter simplicity, saturation, maximum stroke length, stroke thickness, stroke intensity, stroke curvature, wide background strokes, and random strokes. It offers a number of presets, including some unique ones (e.g., palette knife), and a number of different stroke types (e.g., flat and rounded). Additional controls allow you to control canvas, frame, and text effects.
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