Tim Samoff // Weblog (old)

April 13, 2005

Shortcut PhotoArtist...

For years now, I have been startled by how good some of the third-party Adobe Photoshop filters have been. I’ve tried everything from Kai’s Power Tools to the Alien Skin plugins and it amazes me how well they create canned “special effects.” One thing that has always been sorely lacking, though — even with some of Photoshop’s built-in plugins — are realistic painterly effects. Sure, some of them come very close to what you might imagine a water-color or oil-painted version of your photographs might look, but usually, everytime you use the “effect,” it always looks the same.

Enter Shortcut PhotoArtist. The thing is, PhotoArtist is not a plugin for Photoshop (it’s a stand-alone application). But, maybe this is where the breakdown in Photoshop plugins becomes apparent… Maybe a stand-alone application is what is really needed to create realistic effects.

To the right is a screen grab (1600×1200) of the PhotoArtist interface. In it, I am using the “Impressionism” effect on a photograph I took yesterday (see the original here). As you can see, the interface is minimal and uncluttered. There is a pull-down menu for the different effect types, a brush-size slider, blend mode, and opacity. All you have to do to apply an effect to a photograph is choose the effect and paint it on.

I only played around with PhotoArtist for a few minutes, but as you can see by the example to the left (1440×719), I was able to come up with a number of different variations of the original photograph (the last thumbnail is an example of a number of different PhotoArtist effects layered over each other).

PhotoArtist impressed me; I was able to use it “right out of the box” — it was intuitive and easy to understand. Best of all, the effects aren’t just applied to a photograph — you have to “paint” them on. This makes for even more painterly stylizing, as you can work on as little or as much of the photograph as you want. PhotoArtist is not a Photoshop filter, but it’s worth having as a companion to Adobe Creative Suite.

PhotoArtist is available for Mac and Windows, so get yourself a copy today (it’s only $49, so how can you go wrong?).

(I’m looking forward to trying out some of the other products by Shortcut next.)

Posted at 4:21 pm

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So, Kevin… If you don’t have the interest, how can it be interesting?

Just a question.

timsamoff () (URL) - April 14, 2005 at 07:59 am