FotoSketcher Studio 4.60 is officially released 🎨

Hi all,

It took a few days longer than planned, but here it is: FotoSketcher Studio 4.60 is now available for Windows and macOS, free as always.

A big thank you to everyone who downloaded the alpha, the betas and the Release Candidate, tried them on their own photos, and took the time to report what did not work. A good number of the fixes below exist because of your emails and comments.

This is quite a big release. There is a brand new vector engine with real SVG export, two new effects, a reworked fine rotation tool, direct support for Photoshop brushes (.abr format) and a long list of speed improvements and fixes. Here is the full rundown of what has changed since 4.50.

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New Vectorize effect, with real SVG export

Vectorize (Stylize category) turns your photo into flat-coloured shapes with smooth, curved outlines: a true vector illustration rather than a posterised bitmap. Five sliders control the number of colours, the smoothing, the minimum detail size, contour simplification and curvature, so you can go from a bold, simplified poster look all the way to a detailed illustration.

What sets it apart from other effects is that FotoSketcher keeps the geometry rather than throwing it away:

• Save as a real SVG file. Choose the SVG filter in the Save dialog and every shape is written out as an editable curve, ready to open in Inkscape, Illustrator or any other vector editor.
• Razor sharp at any zoom. Above 100% the shapes are drawn from their geometry, so you get clean curves instead of enlarged pixels.
• The vector survives (some of) your edits. Resizing redraws the shapes at the new size instead of resampling them, the fine rotation tool turns the shapes themselves, and undo and redo keep the SVG export intact.
• SVG files can be opened too and an SVG saved by FotoSketcher comes back with its fills, contours and line colours.
• Batch mode saves an SVG file whenever a script leaves a vector result.

BTW, the manual brush can paint Vectorize onto just part of a picture.

Contours only

A new "Contours only (SVG)" switch draws every shape as a hollow outline at a width and colour of your choosing, with no fills at all. This is exactly what cutting machines, pen plotters and animation software need, since most of them cannot use vector fills. The preview, the picture and the SVG all follow the switch.

You can have both at once: blend a "Contours only" run with a filled run of the same picture (drag and drop from the history gallery or use the BLEND command in a script) in normal or multiply mode, and the result stays vector - even if the two runs used different settings. Blending the same contours in again simply darkens them, and you still get a single SVG out of it.

Script users: put SVG PATHS [<#RRGGBB>] [<width>] or SVG FILLS before the EFFECT line.

This can sound complicated, so just try the example script called Vector with contours in the script editor (CTRL+E). 

New Ballpoint pen effect 🖊️

A new Ballpoint pen effect joins the Pen & Ink category. Rather than detecting edges and calling it a drawing, this one builds the whole picture out of short, thin pen strokes: the shading is built up in overlapping layers of strokes whose opacity follows the tone, and the lines and contours are traced as strokes of their own. Local contrast and shadow balancing keep the detail alive in darker photos.

Five sliders: line thickness, edge intensity, darkening, density and precision. That last one is worth playing with - lower the precision and the strokes start to wander and overshoot, like a quick sketch done by hand. In scripts, use EFFECT 204 or BallpointPen.

New Truchet Tiles effect

Also new in the Stylize category: Truchet Tiles. These are square tiles decorated with a simple pattern (typically arcs or diagonal lines) which, placed on a grid in random orientations, produce surprisingly intricate and organic designs. The idea dates back to the 18th century and was later picked up by mathematicians and computer scientists (more on Wikipedia). FotoSketcher fills the tiles with the colours of your source photo, and you can save and load your own custom tilesets.

New Denoise effect

A Denoise effect has been added to the Photo Lab category, powerful enough to clean up noisy skies and high-ISO grain whilst preserving fine detail elsewhere. Very handy as a first step before applying an artistic effect, or simply to rescue a noisy photo. Remember, you can press F12 to use your denoised image as the new source for the next round of effects.

Photoshop brush sets (.abr), loaded directly

Until now, using custom brushes meant finding .abr files online, extracting the individual brushes as PNG images with a separate tool, then loading those PNGs into FotoSketcher. That extra step is gone: brushes no longer have to be PNG files, and .abr brush sets are read directly.

A new window shows every brush tip as it loads (press Esc to stop early and keep what has been read so far). Untick the ones you do not want, or save the ticked tips as PNG files to keep them outside FotoSketcher and build a personal library from several packs.

There are thousands of free .abr brush packs out there - watercolour splashes, dry media, ink splatters, foliage, grunge textures - and they are now a click away.

Warning: it is possible that some .abr files will not open (if their version is not supported). 

Fine rotation, completely reworked

The fine rotation tool has been rebuilt from the ground up.

A dial is now drawn directly on the picture, centred on the rotation pivot, with a handle you drag around the circle. 

Stippling: dot size and colour

The Stippling effect has gained two new parameters.

Dot size renders the stipple with round dots up to eight pixels wide instead of single pixels, for a bolder, more textured look.

Colour takes you from the classic stipple to a full-colour one: at 0 you get the usual black and white, at 50 the picture's colours are reproduced faithfully as coloured dots on white, and at 100 the saturation is doubled for a more vivid result. 

Parameter undo and redo

The effect parameters now remember their previous settings, and two new toolbar icons step back and forth through them. It makes comparing adjustments and returning to an earlier look far easier than reaching for the sliders again.

New example scripts

The embedded script collection has grown, with new ready-made scripts for Ballpoint pen, Crosshatch and Vector with contours. Open the Script Editor to try them out or adapt them to your own style.

Speed improvements

• Smooth Painting is now several times faster. Strokes are composited in software rather than one draw call each, the stroke list is sorted in linear time, a redundant block search and a per-pixel allocation were removed, and the compositing runs on all cores. The result is pixel-identical to before.
• Gouache Painting: the stroke marks, which dominate the render time whenever the impasto slider is above zero, are now applied on all cores - again with an identical result.
• Vectorize: the region merge and sliver passes walk a boundary list built during labelling instead of rescanning the image, and the colour-map fills run in parallel.

Smoother zooming and a more responsive interface

Fine repeating patterns should no longer show moiré when the picture is displayed reduced. The anti-moiré filtering is only applied to pictures that actually need it, so everything else stays crisp. Zooming and panning should also stay fluid on large pictures.

Dragging a slider while the live preview was rendering could also lag by a second or more, because repaint requests were being queued ahead of mouse input. This is hopefully fixed.

Other improvements

• Combine images: the blend mode and strength are remembered for the session (a full reset restores the defaults). The two images are now aligned on their picture centres and the result covers both, so neither is cropped and a frame survives whole. Applying right after moving the slider uses the value shown, and the preview is exactly the image you get.
• History gallery: "Set as source" and "Set as result" keep the picture's own size instead of fitting it onto the other image's canvas, which used to crop framed pictures.
• Batch mode lets you add entire folders to the processing queue, not just individual files.
• Save dialog: the suggested format now follows the picture you opened (JPEG, PNG or WebP), and PNG otherwise.
• Main menu: the icons are clickable like their menu items, and highlight together with them on hover or keyboard selection.
• Undo and redo icons reflect whether there is anything to undo or redo. The Vectorize geometry is kept per undo step (memory permitting), so stepping back reaches the earlier vector result.
• Interface text has been cleaned up in every language: previously untranslated strings were tracked down and added, parameter labels made consistently lowercase, and captions that already fitted are no longer shrunk. The few controls that still overflowed have been widened, and any caption that overflows now scrolls properly.
• Print dialog: the scaling choices (Best Fit, Stretch to Fill, Original Size) are translated when the dialog opens, not only after a language change.

macOS

The Mac build has had a lot of attention this cycle, and this is what held the release up for a few extra days.

The main one: the display no longer freezes or turns magenta after a while on Apple Silicon Macs. The GPU drawing path turned out to be the culprit there and has been replaced by CPU rendering on those machines; Intel Macs keep the GPU path. This was an elusive bug...

On top of that, long operations - fine rotation, quarter turns, resize, SVG opening, frames, the zoomed vector view, history saving - now run in the background instead of stalling the window. The script editor's 3D cube animation pauses while the editor is not the active window and the Save dialog now offers the file format choice.

One note on requirements: Intel Macs now need macOS 10.14 or later.

Bug fixes

• Saved JPEG files could appear as a 1-pixel-wide vertical strip in the Windows image viewer. The embedded 300 dpi information was being written truncated.
• Pasting text no longer erases the image.
• Panning no longer carries on after the mouse button is released outside the picture.
• The fine rotation slider could keep following the mouse after the button was released.
• Rotating a Vectorize result now keeps the geometry in step with the picture.
• Vectorize: a long list of rendering corrections - colour artifacts at low colour counts (green streaks, JPEG halo rims, foliage patches absorbed into clashing hues), jagged quantised edges splitting smooth arcs into tiny curves, thin rules eaten by the sliver pass, barbs and facets on smooth edges, streaks after a vector resize, and outlines that did not properly enclose their region.
  
• And many more smaller bugs that I don't even remember ;)

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Download (100% free)

You can download FotoSketcher Studio 4.60 for Windows and macOS here: fotosketcher.com

A portable Windows version (no setup needed) is available as a .zip, and both builds are digitally signed.

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As always, FotoSketcher is and will remain completely free, with no subscription, no account, no ads and no AI. If you enjoy it and feel like supporting the work, you are very welcome to buy me a coffee ☕ - appreciated but never expected.

Do let me know what you think, and please keep the bug reports coming: contact@fotosketcher.com.

Happy painting!

David