Hello everyone,
A corrected version of FotoSketcher Studio 4.20 is now available from the same download link at https://fotosketcher.com/download-fotosketcher/
If you downloaded version 4.20 yesterday, please re-download and re-install - the installer will cleanly update your existing installation.
What was the bug?
Some users experienced a crash (the famous"Access Violation" error message) when changing the application language, or sometimes when closing the program after a language change. The error did not happen for everyone, which made it trickier to track down.
What caused it?
FotoSketcher uses a scrolling text animation for labels that are too long to fit in their space. When switching languages, the program updated the label texts while some of them were still inside the containers used for this animation. On certain system configurations, these containers were not yet fully initialized at that point, causing the crash. The fix was to properly clean up the animations before updating any text.
Why didn't I catch this during testing?
On my development machine, the timing was always just right and everything was initialized by the time I switched languages. On other machines - different graphics drivers, screen scaling, or just different timing - it was not. A good reminder that "works on my PC" is never quite good enough!
Thank you
A huge thank you to David Garcia, who not only reported the bug within minutes of the release but also went above and beyond by exchanging emails with me late into the night, testing multiple debug builds, and helping me pinpoint the exact conditions that triggered the crash. His fast and thorough feedback was absolutely essential in getting this resolved so quickly.
Thank you also to Jack and everyone else who took the time to test the beta versions and the release. Thank you also to Roberto who corrected some mistakes I had made in the Italian translation. Your feedback and kind words mean a lot, and they really help make FotoSketcher better with each update.
Now, time to get some well deserved rest before the next round of improvements.
Happy sketching!
9 comments:
Thanks again! Have a great rest of your day.
Thanks :) I certainly will!
You were really fast and thorough trying to find the cause of the issue. Thanks again, David!
You're most welcome. You were a huge help, first reporting the bug then helping me test and debug since I could not reproduce the issue. Thanks again :)
Thank you for your years of work on this. I remember using Fotosketcher more than 10 years ago.
I've been finding the recent beta and this 4.20 really slow on MacOS. More specifically the UI doesn't respond, and it feels like it has crashed. The actual rendering seems to be quick, but the UI is not. I'm using a Macbook Pro M2 Mac with 32GB RAM and Macos 15.7.5 ... so not an old slow machine.
Is it just me? Do others have a problem with the UI?
Hi,
My user base on MacOS is still very small, so I have not had similar reports yet, but I have tested on an M1 machine with less RAM than yours and if the UI was by no means snappy, it was still acceptable. I'll investigate to try and make the MacOS version more responsive.
Hello again, I've just uploaded a new MacOS version (same download link as before) if you want to reinstall it. It seems to run better on my Mac.
Thanks David - I just tried your updated version and the UI has improved. Thanks again!
By the way I'm interested in learning about the algorithms used to create painterly/drawing style effects. Do you have any recommendations for learning resources - books, blogs, videos? I wouldn't want you to reveal any proprietary work you've done - just what is out there as public knowledge for others to learn from. This is my only attempt whic is very basic and uses "simplex/perlin" noise to create brush strokes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKBcO-nZeDM
That's great news, thank you for your feedback! And that video shows a really good looking result, even with a simple Perlin noise. Sign of a great implementation.
As for research, when I started I already had some knowledge about computer graphics, but I remember buying a very thorough book back in the days (Digital Image Processing, second edition, by R. Gonzalez and R. Woods - 2005!). I can't say I understood everything, but it gave me some foundations and a lot of ideas for algorithms. I also found some good tutorials on the web (e.g. on region growing: https://xphilipp.developpez.com/articles/segmentation/regions/?page=page_1) and a lot of research papers on the subject of NPR (not the radio, but Non-Photorealistic Rendering). It was eye-opening how rich and active a field of research that was (and still is, despite AI being more prevalent now). The seminal paper "Painterly Rendering with Curved Brush Strokes of Multiple Sizes" by Aaron Hertzmann is a must read. I also read lots of papers from the different SIGGRAPH conventions. Incredible stuff. And processing, that you already know well, is also a great source of inspiration!
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