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