FotoSketcher Studio 4.70 Beta 1 is ready for testing

Hi all,

The first beta of FotoSketcher Studio 4.70 is now available. On top of everything introduced in Alpha 1 (Classic Painters, the four 3.98 paintings and more), this build brings a few new tools I’m quite excited about, along with many improvements and fixes.

- New: Smart eraser

The manual brush window has a new switch that turns the brush into an eraser. Paint over something you don’t want in your photo (a person, a sign, a car...) and when you release the mouse, it’s gone, with the background filled in.

There is an optional add-on (Windows 64-bit only): a small neural network that works out what lies behind the erased object. It helps most in busy scenes. FotoSketcher offers to download it (29 MB) the first time you switch the eraser on. Everything runs locally on your own computer and no picture is ever sent anywhere.

Source photo before applying the smart eraser

Source photo after applying the smart eraser on boats, birds, people, aeriels, etc...

- New: Palette transfer

A new effect in the Photo Lab category that gives your picture the colours of another image, a painting for instance. A reference is built in (Van Gogh’s “Wheat Field with Cypresses”) so it works straight away, and you can click it to load your own. Sliders let you adjust the intensity, the number of colours and the colour distribution.

- New: Advanced parameters

A new window, available from the main menu, gathers the settings that don’t belong to any particular effect. They are remembered between sessions:

• JPEG and WebP quality (now 90 by default), file name suffix and batch output format
• SVG antialiasing on or off when saving (off gives hard pixel edges, great for pixel art), and the size SVG files are opened at
• Colour and line width for SVG “Contours only”
• Check for updates and random seed
• Download or remove the smart eraser neural network add-on

- New: Escape now pauses

Pressing Esc while an effect is being applied now opens a small window where you can interrupt processing, save the current image, or resume.

- New: 17 example scripts

Seventeen new example scripts showcase the 4.70 effects, including Morning Glow, Rembrandt Chiaroscuro, Hopper Fifties, Banknote Engraving, Van Gogh Palette and more.

- Improvements

• Manual brush: on Windows, the manual brush is much, much faster and responsive
• Classic Painters: the colour slider now really makes the colours duller or more vivid (50 leaves them unchanged).
• Scripts: new commands ANTIALIASING ON / OFF and LUT_EMBEDDED
• Resize: with the ratio locked, proportions are now kept correctly on very large images.
• Full screen preview: now opens on the monitor FotoSketcher is on (sometimes it did not)
• Translations: all new text is available in the 14 languages.
• Checking for updates: if FotoSketcher is up-to-date, the message in the top left of the form is now more visible. 

- Bug fixes

• SVG files not made by FotoSketcher could open with the wrong colours, or one pixel too wide.
• An Abstract SVG reopened as a single colour with outlines, and parts of a Line halftone SVG reopened transparent.
• A Vectorize result resized to different proportions or rotated had its corners filled with the background colour.
• Script editor: the Blend button didn’t add its line, and selected text in the command reference (the cheat sheet) was highlighted in the wrong place.
• Gallery: the round preview could occasionally stay open after the pointer had left its thumbnail.
• Watercolor: a preview issue has been fixed.
• Windows: after a quick double click on the taskbar icon, or clicks on it while an effect was running, the window could stop responding to the mouse.
• With the manual brush open, the progress bar of some effects (Denoise, for one) stayed on screen.

You can download Beta 1 (for Windows) here: https://fotosketcher.com/beta/FotoSketcher_4.70_beta1.zip

Happy testing!

David

FotoSketcher Studio 4.70 Alpha 1 is ready for testing

Hi all,

The first alpha of FotoSketcher Studio 4.70 is now available for testing, for Windows only for the moment. This is another big one, with a brand new effect category I have been working on for years, the return of four favourites from the classic version, and a good number of improvements and fixes.

- New category: Classic Painters

Classic Painters is built on a completely new brushstroke engine that I started years ago. Rather than stamping brush images, it simulates real brushstrokes, which allows for very different styles. There are eleven painters to choose from: Classic oil, Van Gogh, Monet, Cézanne, Seurat, Rembrandt, Sargent, Turner, Gauguin, Renoir and Hopper. Honest disclaimer: some of these painters will look close to the real thing. Others... not so much, or at least not all the time. Either way, I think they all produce cool results, and I hope you'll agree.

• Each painter has its own brush and its own palette.
• Each stroke behaves like a real brush, with bristles that mix with the wet paint as they go.
• The paint relief comes from museum photographs of real Van Gogh and Rembrandt paintings.
• You can watch the canvas being painted, stroke by stroke.

- Four classic 3.98 paintings are back

Many of you have asked for these. Four painting effects from FotoSketcher 3.98 have been ported to Studio. They give exactly the same result as 3.98, only several times faster:

• Palette knife (was Painting 4 in 3.98): up to 8× faster, with custom brushes
• Impressionist (was Painting 10 in 3.98): about 5× faster, strokes now stop at edges
• Watercolor 3 (was Painting 1 in 3.98)
• Brushstrokes 3 (was Painting 7 in 3.98)

Speed figures are measured on my own PC, so your mileage may vary. Bonus: parameter settings files (.fsk) saved with 3.98 for Painting 1, 4, 7 and 10 now open directly as their exact recreations.

- Other new effects

• Crosshatch 2: pen hatching in colour.
• Line halftone: lines whose width follows the darkness of the picture. They can run at an angle, follow the shapes or wave, and the result can be saved as vectors (SVG).
• Abstract: flat colour planes cut by straight lines. Can also be saved as SVG.
• Modern art: a cubist-style portrait painting. Not quite Picasso ;)

- Improvements

• Random seed: right-click PARAMETERS to get repeatable results, or use the SEED command in scripts.
• Watermark and text: a new rotation handle, with Apply and Remove buttons next to it. "Load watermark..." brings back the last watermark used in the session.
• Rotation: the quarter-turn buttons are now combined with fine rotation into a single button, for a slightly more compact interface.
• Brushes: Affinity .afbrushes sets and brush sets inside ZIP files can now be loaded, and loading is faster.
• AVIF: pictures in this format can now be opened (not saved).
• Manual brush: 2 to 3 times faster for some effects.
• Directional strokes: full render about 30% faster.
• Translations: all new text should be available in the 14 languages. Warning, machine translation!

- Bug fixes

• The preview didn't always refresh after the source picture changed (crop, resize, rotation, undo, swap, frames, scripts, gallery).
• Previews ignored the "do not erase background" toggle.
• The Vintage/Sepia and Retro film vignettes were applied to the preview window instead of the whole picture.
• Pressing Ctrl+R twice raised an error.
• Reopening Add text/watermark brought back text that had already been applied.
• ZIP files of brushes made on a Mac could cause errors when loading.

- New bugs (not too many I hope)

With this many changes, I have almost certainly introduced a few new bugs. If you find any, please let me know, you will have my eternal gratitude ;)

You can download Alpha 1 (for Windows) here: https://fotosketcher.com/beta/FotoSketcher_4.70_alpha1.zip

Happy testing!

David - contact@fotosketcher.com