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Interested in turning photographs into works of digital art, such as cartoons, charcoal drawings, ink drawings, oil paintings, pastel drawings, and watercolors? Here are brief descriptions of some key software tools for desktop computers. Unless otherwise noted they work in Photoshop as plug-ins.
Best MS Paint Alternatives For Mac. Since its inception, Mac has been the operating system of choice for creative enthusiasts and professionals around the globe. So it's no wonder that macOS is the primary destination for the best new drawing, painting, image and video editing, and sketching applications. Quick start your art by taking advantage of the 12 AI Styles that create a stylized painting from an image. Fine tune the settings for custom results and save your own presets. Experiment by adding a style, or more than one, to any type of imagery. Try stylizing a sketch, painting, illustration or just brushstrokes and see where styles can take. Dynamic Auto-Painter (DAP) is a world-class leading software to automatically turn a photo into a great looking painting inspired by some of the most famous real world artists. It does this using unique in-house developed Monte Carlo Style Transfer algorithm. This is not just ordinary photo-to-painting. Super Vectorizer 2 for Mac is used to vectorize image for personal and professional projects alike, whether you are a hobbyist or an graphic design company. With Technological Advances in raster to vector conversion, Super Vectorizer 2 for Mac does an impressive job of vectorizing raster bitmap images and convert to crisp, clean, scalable fine line art illustrations and vector art.
Topaz Impression
Topaz Impression is a free legacy product that is no longer supported; however it can still be downloaded. Impression is a very powerful and highly customizable tool for transforming photos and other images into a wide variety of digital artworks, such as drawings and paintings.
When you choose the Impression filter, you will see a cornucopia of controls. Here are some key adjustments:
- Bush: There are currently 17 different bush options.
- Number of strokes: High, medium, and low.
- Brush size.
- Paint volume: How thick does the paint look.
- Paint opacity: How transparent is the paint.
- Stroke rotation: If enabled, rotation variation can also be controlled.
- Stroke color variation: Increasing this value makes strokes have a wider range of color.
- Stroke width.
- Stroke length.
- Spill: Strokes “spill” out over their normal edges.
- Smudge: Strokes are blurred and stylized, losing detail.
- Coverage: How fully does the paint cover the canvas.
- Color: Each major color can be varied by hue, saturation, and lightness. Where the color is present in the image can be previewed. Hue, saturation, and lightness of the entire image can also be controlled.
- Lighting: Brightness, contrast, highlight, shadow, can be altered. Light position can be set.
- Vignette: Vignette size, strength, transition, roundness, color, and center position can be determined.
- Texture: Background material and background strength and solidity can be set.
You can modify your image directly with these controls or use an existing preset. After tweaking your settings, you can save them as a custom preset.
Impression is especially useful for charcoal drawings, colored pencil drawings, da Vinci drawings, oil paintings, and pastel drawings.
Overall, Impression is a powerful, full-featured digital art tool; however, it is unclear how long it will continue to be available and to remain functional.
Here's an example of an oil painting that was created using an earlier version of Impression and other programs:
Snap Art by Exposure
Snap Art is a full-featured Windows/Mac plug-in/standalone program that allows you to easily create charcoal drawings, color pencil drawings, comics, crayon drawings. impasto paintings, oil paintings, pastel drawings (including hard, oil, and soft pastel), pen and ink drawings, pencil sketches, Pointillism paintings, stylized illustrations, and watercolor paintings.
There are a variety of presets for each effect, and slider controls for background (e.g, for oil paint: brush size, photorealism, coverage, stroke length, and color variation), detail masking (similar controls as background), colors (e.g., brightness, contrast, and saturation), lighting (e.g., angle, direction, and highlight characteristics as well as vignette effect), and canvas effects (e.g, pastel paper). You can create your own presets. The ability to close side-panel controls permits a large preview space.
This program is especially useful for charcoal drawings, colored pencil drawings, oil paintings (try the detailed, dry brush, and thick paint settings), and pencil drawings. It has good canvas and paper texture effects.
Here's an example of a oil pastel drawing that was created using Snap Art and other programs:
FotoSketcher
FotoSketcher is a versatile standalone Windows program that allows you to create drawings, paintings, and a few other effects. It can transform photos into cartoons, oil paintings, oil pastel drawings, pen and ink drawings, pencil drawings, watercolor paintings. and other types of artworks. It is freeware.
Sliders and other controls for each effect allow you modify image rendition. For example, for the oil pastel sketch effect you can control minimum stroke size, maximum stroke size, number of iterations, edge intensity, and filter precision. You can also soften edges, add a frame, add texture, add text, and use a retouch brush. There is a small preview window in the floating control panel.
This program is especially useful for oil paintings, oil pastel drawings, and watercolors.
Here's an example of an oil painting that was created using FotoSketcher:
AKVIS Sketch
AKVIS Sketch is a Windows/Mac plug-in/standalone program that allows you to create drawings and watercolors. It offers a very wide variety of effects, such as charcoal, color pencil, lead pencil, pastel, and watercolor. The effects are organized into two groups: classic and artistic.
Sliders allow you to fine-tune these effects. For example, using the detailed sketch effect and the strokes panel, you can adjust pencil color and background color; alter stroke angle, thickness, and length; and control midtones hatching and intensity. Using the edges panel, you can alter sensitivity, edge width, and zone of influence. With the effects panel, you can adjust panel, shadows, noise, and contrast.
This program is especially useful for pencil drawings.
Here's an example of a black pen drawing that was created using AKVIS Sketch and other programs:
AKVIS OilPaint
AKVIS OilPaint is a Windows/Mac plug-in/standalone program that allows you to create oil paintings and oil pastel drawings You can alter simplicity, saturation, maximum stroke length, stroke thickness, stroke intensity, stroke curvature, wide background strokes, and random strokes. It offers a number of presets, including some unique ones (e.g., palette knife), and a number of different stroke types (e.g., flat and rounded). Additional controls allow you to control canvas, frame, and text effects.
If you like a fairly realistic painting style, try the high details or fine lines presets.
Here's an example of a oil painting that was created using AKVIS OilPaint:
Dynamic Auto-Painter by MediaChance
Dynamic Auto-Painter, a Windows/Mac stand-alone program, allows you to paint in the style of famous painters, such as Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, and Vincent van Gogh. It allows you to create a wide variety of types of artworks.
There are a variety of controls for each preset, such as brush strokes, canvas, detail brushes, faithfulness, realism, palette, and quality. It supports advanced (e.g, color shift), retouch, outline, canvas, material, color, and layer adjustments. Artwork rendering occurs in stages, with further user fine-tuning possible during some stages. It is possible to change the color palate of the original image by having the program use a second image as a color source. Some presets significantly change image coloration.
While the presets can be used to easily create artworks, the real power of this program is not revealed until you start using the advanced controls and directing brush strokes during the creation process.
This program is especially useful for aquarelle/watercolor paintings and oil paintings.
Here's an example of a oil painting that was created using Dynamic Auto-Painter and other programs:
JixiPix Programs
JixiPix offers a wide variety of low-cost Windows/Mac plug-in/standalone programs. They are categorized as professional software or hobbyists and enthusiasts apps. The professional software programs provide greater control over effects and can be used as Photoshop plug-ins. They can be purchased individually or as part of a bundle.
Especially useful JixiPix programs include:
- Aquarella (watercolor paintings)
- Artoon (cartoon drawings)
Here's an example of a watercolor painting that was created using Aquarella:
Other Digital Art Software to Consider
Depending on your artistic requirements and style, the following software may also be of interest.
- AKVIS ArtWork (comic, gouache, linocut, oil painting, pastel, pen & ink, pointillism, and watercolor effects)
- AKVIS Charcoal (charcoal and chalk drawings)
- AKVIS Draw (highly expressive, loose drawing effects; resource intensive)
- AKVIS Pastel (crayon, oil pastel, and pastel effects)
- AKVIS Watercolor (aquarelle and watercolor effects)
- JixiPix Impresso Pro (oil painting effects)
- JixiPix Pastello (chalk, crayon, pastel, and pencil effects)
- JixiPix Watercolor Studio
- ToonIt! (cartoon, graphic novel, woodcut, and other effects)
- Topaz Clean (cartoon effects; free legacy product that is no longer supported)
First-Line Recommendations by Type of Artwork
Free Painting Software Mac
- Aquarelle/Watercolor: AKVIS Watercolor, Aquarella, Dynamic Auto-Painter, and FotoSketcher
- Cartoon: Arttoon, Topaz Clean, and ToonIt!
- Charcoal Drawing: Impression and Snap Art
- Colored Pencil Drawing: Impression and Snap Art
- Gouache: AKVIS ArtWork
- Oil Painting: AKVIS OilPaint, Dynamic Auto-Painter, FotoSketcher, Impression, and Snap Art
- Oil Pastel Painting: FotoSketcher
- Pastel Drawing: Impression and Snap Art
- Pencil Drawing/Sketch: AKVIS Sketch, Impression, and Snap Art
- Woodcuts: ToonIt!
Useful Photo Editing Software
The following software is recommended for editing artistic works:
- Exposure (very powerful full-featured photo editor with numerous useful presets; highly recommended)
- Luminar and Luminar Flex (powerful full-featured photo editors, especially useful for light ray effects)
- ON1 Photo RAW (powerful full-featured photo editor with numerous useful presets)
- Topaz ReStyle (a very powerful free legacy tool for changing image colors; highly recommended, but no longer supported.)
Purchase Advice
It is highly recommended that you download and test digital art software demos prior to purchase. Try all the presets. A software company's idea of what a good art effect is may not match your own, so experiment with changing the settings of unsatisfactory effects before concluding that the program cannot do what you want.
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It is especially important to test the limits of a program and to determine what features can be disabled. For example, see how much detail you can get in a painting and check whether it is possible to turn off the texture effect (i.e, canvas).
In some cases, it is worth buying a program for one or two unique effects even though the rest may not be satisfactory or may duplicate effects you already have in other programs.
A detailed user manual—ideally in the PDF format—can be of great help in using advanced program features. Check to see if a manual is available. Looking at a product's video tutorials is also helpful in making a purchasing decision.
If possible, save older versions of software. New versions may drop or significantly change features you rely on.
Software Licensing and Sales Policies
AKVIS has separate home, home deluxe, and business licenses. Only business licenses allow commercial use.
JixiPix licenses have this clause: 'Output from SOFTWARE PRODUCT can be sold, shared, distributed, printed, etc. in any amounts without limitation as long as bulk of design is provided by you. This means you cannot take output from SOFTWARE PRODUCT that does not contain large portions of your image.'
Companies typically offer one or more software bundles, which reduce the prices of included products.
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Some companies, such as Exposure, offer their products at substantial discounts during sales, which typically occur during major US holidays. These are especially good times to buy software bundles.
About the Author
Digital artist Charles W. Bailey, Jr. transforms public domain and personal photographs into noncommercial digital artworks using specialized Photoshop plug-ins and art programs.
He has made over 600 digital artworks freely available on Flickr, providing detailed information about how each artwork was created, and, for public domain images, attribution of the original image creator (if available). Bailey also posts new artworks on 500px.
Bailey's artwork files on Flickr are 300 DPI JPEGs that are 8 in. by 10 in. or larger. All files are under versions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial licenses (here is a representative license).
A comprehensive list of Bailey's digital artworks is available.
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'Nice program for quick and easy vector tracings' -- Aprilschild
'Its strong points are accurate line traces and color separations. It does use bezier curves to replicate round edges, which is an essential feature not often found in vecorization apps in this price range.' -- C71
'Its strong points are accurate line traces and color separations. It does use bezier curves to replicate round edges, which is an essential feature not often found in vecorization apps in this price range.' -- C71