Sunday, October 6, 2013

FotoSketcher 2.60 beta available soon

Hi all,

Just a quick post to let you know that I'm currently putting the finishing touches to version 2.60. There is still a little tweaking and debugging to be done, but I should be able to release a test version soon.

The main change will be a new watercolor painting effect which will replace the current Painting 1 effect that I'm no longer happy with. Here is an example of the new painting filter (click on image for full-size view):


Stay tuned :)

Regards,

David

14 comments:

Peter (BC, Canada) said...

Salut David,

Great a brand new tool!
I'm eager to try your newest gadget!

David said...

Hi Pierre!
The new effect is still a bit rough around the edges and needs some optimizing, but I should have a beta ready in a few days.
Cheers,
David

Casey said...

Looks interesting.

That Painting one was OK.. well.. OK-ish.

But it really only worked well on a few specific images.

Good for you, going back over things and not just resting on your laurels.

Might I suggest something too: A stroke by luminosity thing - where the stroke direction changes based on the grey scale map of the image. (It would make thing look more random/human artist drawn)?

David said...

Hi Casey,

Thanks for your suggestion. I actually tried it a while back, but could not make it work very well (my bad, the idea is sound).
As for the new Painting 1 effect, I think it will indeed replace the old one favorably. Here is my latest effort: test image
(original image credit http://photographpainter.de/venedig-hdr/).
Cheers,
David

Peter said...

Hi David,

The test image you made looks very interesting. The watercolor effect seems to be working fine. Architecture are a nice choice, yet will it work as good with all types of images, like leaves and landscape?

I'll give it a try whenever you are ready!

David said...

Hi Pierre,

Yes, the new effect seems to work quite well on some landscape photos. In general, if the original picture is nicely saturated (HDR works well) the result will look very painterly.
I'll try to upload a beta version this week-end so you can play with it :-)

Regards,

David

Casey said...

Looking good!

Suggestion, if possible: Look into a slider that controls amount of cross-bleed from colour to colour (see the hard edged changes on the bottom left of you demo picture).

Something like that would allow a watercolour like bleed of areas.

It might be hard to do; I imagine it's counter to your actual method of segmentation of colour areas, so don't feel bad if you can't make it work.

Maybe a blur, but only on colour edges?

As for luminosity strokes - the idea came from MS Impressionist plugin - it's old but still damn wonderful!

It ha a stroke by hue/luminosity/etc.



It's still a great program, whatever you can do. And huge huge respect for making it free and keeping it so.. and for sticking with it!

David said...

Hi Casey,

In the new effect, there is indeed a slider which controls the colour "bleeding". It is indeed the opposite to my segmentation algorithm (used in Painting 5 for instance).

Unknown said...

David,

Fabulous Product! You truely gifted & I look forward to the update.

Thanks - Jay

David said...

Thank you, Jay :) Glad that you like FotoSketcher!

Casey said...

"In the new effect, there is indeed a slider which controls the colour "bleeding"."

Me: "Squeeeeeeee!!!!!!"

(just ever so slightly excited)

David said...

:-) 2.60 beta is almost ready (still needs a bit of polishing) and I might be able to upload it today.

Peter (BC) said...

Salut David,

One suggestion regarding naming of file. Would it be possible to keep the orginal name AND adding an extension to that name, instead of having it named, "FotoSketcher image.jpg"? And also, since I do many try outs, would it be possible to add a number following the name?

Ex. Original name: MyPhoto.jpg
First FS drawing, saved as: MyPhoto_Fotosketcher_1.jpg"

Second drawing, saved as: MyPhoto_Fotosketcher_2.jpg"
Etc.

Does that seem possible?

Thanks!

David said...

Hi Pierre,

Indeed I've been thinking of adding FotoSketcher as a suffix rather than prefix (i.e. myphoto_FotoSketcher.jpg) so that source images are sorted alphabetically next to the sketched results. I think I'll let people manually add numbers at the end though (I don't want to risk adding bugs to my code, LOL).