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Photographers have a fascination of being able to make their images look like paintings. With the widespread use of digital imaging, there are a number of excellent applications that will simulate numerous artists’ styles with a couple of mouse clicks. PhotoArtMaster is a stand alone application that creates painterly effects on digital photographs. The interface, although quirky, offers plenty of scope for experimentation, although perhaps not as intuitive as it could have been.
Open an image (only jpegs are supported), you can set a resolution at this stage of Small, Medium, Large, or Original picture. This is a basic downsizing of image – you can’t resample upwards. Next go to the Image Preparation Editor. Here you can crop, rotate, flip, mirror and make tonal adjustments. The image editor is basic, even when using a fast computer it’s a slow process. At the bottom of the screen is a tutorial which is poorly laid out - you have to scroll down, up and sideways to read it. To top it all, the tutorial tells you to go to the next stage (The Studio Editor) from there you are lost because the tutorial stays on the Preparation Editor screen. Fortunately, there is a colourful manual with plenty of useful information, three tutorials, and sample images which are installed with the application.
With your image preparations completed, return back to the main screen (Picture Central), from here you go into the main core of the application, the Studio Editor. On the Studio Editor screen there are 13 tabs, each tab has a series of small thumbnails of the current image. The tabs have names such as Main Colour, Bright Colour, Monochrome etc. A good place to start is with the Main Edges tab, click on the desired effect and the image is transferred to the palette. Next, either click on the fast transfer button which then transfers the image to the main canvas area, or select a brush and selectively paint in the parts you want. The brush acts as a clone tool. The 14 brushes are crude and the sizes are predefined, but you do have a hard or soft choice for each making a total of 28 choices.
Once you have painted in the areas you want then you click the Fix Artwork button. If you forget to do this then you could lose all the work you have just done. This should have been an automatic process once you start on the next item. With your initial work done, click another tab and select another effect. This is transferred to the palette replacing the first image. Again, use the brush tool to selectively paint in the effect on the canvas. At this stage you can choose one of the mixer options and this will allow you to blend in the artwork with the underlying layers. The mixer options are not that clear, but reading the manual should clarify their use. It does seem rather complicated for a supposedly simple application, but the effects you can achieve are quite remarkable.
Once your project has been completed you can either save it or go to the Print Preview and Printing screen. Via this screen you can tweak image colour, contrast etc., prior to printing. At the bottom of this screen there are several sample images which serve no purpose whatsoever. This space could have been put to better use by allowing you to preview a gallery of your own creations and allowing you to select images for printing.
Verdict
The artistic styles PhotoArtMaster offers are limited to variations on watercolour or edge detection effects. This may be oversimplifying the full power of this application. For software that has the words “Art Master” in its title, I would have liked more options in art styles and user definable brushes. The application interface is in need of a major overhaul - it looks and feels like shareware.
At £44.95 this software is priced about right.
For Windows 98, XP, 2000 or NT 4. only.
Pros: Cons:
Price £44.95
© Vincent
Oliver 2003 www.photo-i.co.uk |
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