Feature: Ben Vista's PhotoArtist is a standalone artistic styling or finishing Tool
Motivation: Similar to ArtMaster and Virtual Painter, I have found it highly useful

One of the tragedies of the digital camera era is all the pictures that get thrown away. Yes, to be sure, photographers learn faster from their mistakes. But many of those mistakes are relatively small though hard to correct and obvious. Portions out of focus, areas of high contrast, high noise, vignetting - blunders as much of technology as in the shooters hands. We have been beaming some of the artful dodger tools like Artmaster Pro or Virtual Painter which allow users to put a painterly finish onto their images - and that is certainly what PhotoArtist does. But one can work so fast in PhotoArtist it opens up some other photofinishing possibilities which I will discuss below.

So I shall start with the main usage of PhotoArtist, styling an image so it has a distinctive painterly look. But then I shall explore a couple of other uses for PhotoArtist.

I start with an image from Banff - a bit prosaic, so I want to add an artistic touch:

The before Banff image

There is a little haze in the image, I did not have a UV filter for the shot; but also the image has the humdrum, oh-yeah another look at Banff mountains. Lets see what PhotoArtist can do.

PhotoArtist works, on the surface, similar to Artmaster Pro. There 22 different art stylings or filter settings each of which has 1 to eight variations. Users can either paint in selected areas or completely fill the image with these stylings. How the stylings work is determined crucially by two additional settings:
opacity - determines how much of the new styling layer will be blended with the accumulated underlying layer. 100%, as in the screenshot, means the styling layer will completely replace the underlying layer.
blend mode - determines how those two layers will be blended and features eight familiar blend modes: normal, lighten, darken, multiply, screen, dodge, burn and overlay.
In effect these controls take the 22 basic styling and result in hundreds of variations. And when you blend those variations at settings below 80% opacity the stylings truly become unique.

So having gotten the softer look over the complete image (using the bucket fill button)by way of the Impressionist styling I want to paint back more detail in the mid section of the mountain which is a bit too mushy for my liking:

Note what I do. First, I change the styling to Sketch because I know this will add sharper and darker edges to areas painted with this style. But I reduce the opacity to 40% - this comes from simple trial and error. Every brush stroke can be erased two ways. Use the right-mouse and stroke over the same areas you have just painted to erase the effect. Or use the erase tool whose icon is right next to the paintbrush tool. Now erasing will occur with left mouse button.

Also note that I have changed the blend mode to Darken. Again simple trial and error showed I needed to move up from Normal mode to get darker lines and strokes. Also it would have been nice to be able to change the HSL -Hue/Saturation/Lightness of the image - but that is a shortcoming addressed below.

As you can see in the screenshot above, we can do only one of those tasks. Using the Glow style and a very low opacity it is possible to lighten up the foreground of the image. However, we have to do the final HSL editing back in PhotoShop.

Here is our final finished image:


Other Uses of PhotoArtist


Some of my colleagues and clients use PhotoArtist to add their own distinctive look to their images. And to extent I am doing the same. However, more often than not I find myself using PhotoArtist to rescue images that are just outside the bounds as described at the beginning of this review. For, example after much photofinishing effort, the image on the left still had too much contrast in the snow and softness in focus in splotches to be really effective. However with the help of using two different PhotoArtist stylings, I was able to achieve the original attraction of the scene - outer coating of snow, inner protected fall colors.

This is very satisfying. To know that I do not have to throw away the original inspiration and scene because of my own or some technical shortcoming. All of the Artful Dodgers help to do this - the low cost, speed, and fairly broad set of stylings in PhotoArtist make it particularly attractive to use.

A second use for PhotoArtist that I am finding cropping up more often is to compensate for not lugging around a Canon bazooka lens. You know the 100-400mm f2.4, 2 feet long and ten pound monsters on monopods that you see lined up with their photographers at every major sporting event . One of the key advantages of the bazooka (besides being 1-2 stops faster than a mere mortal's telephoto zoom lens) is that the out of focus background is really blurred and out of focus - and therefore the focus is on the subject:

In the picture of Santa's Elves, the background brick, plant and store window distract attention from the kids. By applying the Aquarel and Impressionist styling from PhotoArtist I am able to approximate the Bazooka's blurring effect. Yes, I could use the Blur tools in Photoshop or other favorite photo editor but I like the stylings and blending options in PhotoArtist much better.

5 Suggested Improvements

PhotoArtist's works fast and is very easy learn how to and then use - don't change that! However, there are five small adjustments/ improvements to the program that would make it more useful:
1 - allow the big fat toolbar strip along the top to be toggled on and off, artists need all the working space they can get.
2 - allow the original image to be displayed in the preview window perhaps with a click on the original's thumbnail image so users can more readily compare before and after.
3 - there is a brush shape pulldown, add a brush density or hardness pulldown where the outer radius of the brush applies less effect then the center core to varying degrees. This would ease the effort of painting near areas where you don't want the effect/styling to be applied.
4 - allow a single effect stroke. It is hard to fill in uniformly a style in areas like the sky or water where the surface color and texture are largely the same or slowly grade off. A single effect stroke like in ArtMaster Pro means as long as the user continually holds the mouse down the effect will not build up but rather styling changes stop at some bound or limit no matter how many times the mouse is dragged over the area while the mouse is being held down in any one stroke. However, the next mouse release and click sets a new maximum - and now painting over the same area will deepen the styling to a new bound/maximum. This allows achieving a uniform styling much more quickly.
5 - because PhotoArtist is standalone, it should have some way to do Hue Saturation Lightness and Brightness Contrast corrections. I spend a lot of time going in and out of PhotoArtist to make these corrections and adjustments.

But these suggested improvements show just how far along the development curve PhotoArtist is. Unlike other artist software which just paints in different stylings, PhotoArtist combines and mixes the stylings for unique gradations by means of opacity and blend style that allows one to achieve one's own distinctive look. This is a major, step-above capability.

Summary

Right from the start I was impressed with the speed which PhotoArtist delivers. Like ArtMaster Pro there is a delay as PhotoArtist sets up for a new style but at 2-5 seconds it is much faster than ArtMaster Pro. The downside is that PhotoArtist does not employ the full range of line, edge, and area smarts that ArtMaster Pro displays. But because of the speed, low cost ($50US), and availability in both Windows and Mac, I find myself recommending PhotoArtist for a broader range of photofinishing chores.