FotoSketcher 4.30 Release Candidate is now available for testing

Hi all,

The Release Candidate for FotoSketcher 4.30 is now ready for download. This build is feature-complete: everything planned for 4.30 is in place, and the focus from here is on weeding out any remaining bugs before the final release. If the RC holds up well across different systems, it will become version 4.30 with little or no change.

For anyone who did not follow the beta versions, here is the full rundown of what is new in 4.30 compared to 4.20.

- New "Stylize" category with four new effects

A new Stylize category groups four brand-new effects, all built on the same space-filling algorithm:

• Mosaic turns your photos into classic tiled mosaic patterns.
• Cartoon produces a graphic style with defined lines and solid colours. Tip: With the colour intensity slider set to 0 it draws a pure outline drawing, with no colour fill. Combined with the "Do not erase background" option, you can apply any effect first and then run Cartoon at intensity 0 on top to add crisp contours to any result in two steps.
• Circles fills the image with circles of varying sizes that follow the colour edges in the photo.
• Triangles tiles the image with triangles for a low-poly illustration feel.

- Lookup Tables (LUTs)

A new LUTs effect has been added to the Photo Lab category for custom colour grading. It ships with 18 presets built directly into the application, selectable from a new "Select LUT…" button with a live preview of each look (right-click the preview to compare with the original):

Architecture, Blues, Cinematic, Cinematic saturation, Cyan skies, Film print, Film tone 1, Film tone 2, Golden hour, HDR, HDR natural, Kodachrome, Monochrome artistic, Monochrome balanced, Monochrome vintage, Portrait, Rich colors, Vibrant light.

You can also load your own custom .cube files from disk.

- Auto-Enhance

A new Auto-Enhance feature attempts to optimize the source image (exposure, white balance, local contrast) for a clean, natural-looking result. It is available from the menu or by pressing E.

- Script engine additions

The script engine has been updated to support the new effects (LUTs, Mosaic, Cartoon, Circles and Triangles), and three new commands are now available in the Script Editor:

• ENHANCE - auto-enhances the working image in a single line.
• LUT_FILE <path> - loads a .cube file from disk for the next LUTs effect step.
• LUT_EMBEDDED <name> - selects one of the 18 built-in presets by name (case-insensitive, spaces allowed).

If you would like to see these commands in action, the recent scripting tutorial on the blog includes several ready-made example scripts that use them.

- Full Reset

A new Full Reset function clears everything back to the application's initial state in one step: working image, history, LUT, script, custom brushes and all sliders, without having to close and reopen the program. To trigger it, right-click the exit button (the icon that turns red in the icon bar) or press Ctrl+Shift+N.

- UI improvements

• Thumbnails in the history gallery now show a blue dot to indicate images that have not been modified, making it easier to spot your original source images at a glance.
• Hovering over a thumbnail now displays a tooltip with the filename and file size.
• Added support for opening .webp images, a format often found on the web.
• Improved Italian and Korean translations - thanks to Roberto and Jaehyung!

- Bug fixes

• The window now correctly re-scales when moved between monitors with different DPI settings.
• Fixed an issue on macOS where the splash screen could reappear on top of the main window after being dismissed.
• When the "Erase background" option is off, the Cartoon effect now correctly blends the pre-effect pixels into the output instead of discarding them.
• Various smaller fixes and polish based on Beta 2 feedback.

Plus some under-the-hood code optimizations have also been made to (hopefully) improve overall rendering speed.

You can download the Release Candidate (for Windows) here: https://fotosketcher.com/beta/FotoSketcher_4.30_RC.zip

As always, any feedback is very welcome, especially anything that does not feel right on your particular setup. Please leave a comment below or send me an email at contact@fotosketcher.com.

Happy testing!

David