Somewhere below and earlier (i.e., here) there’s a slideshow made up of individually digitally filtered images, all derived from a single, starting image. Back in 2005 I wrote a short online article (it’s here: http://www.dpandi.com/howtos/artmasterpro/) covering some aspects of such filtering. Unfortunately, the source of the Photoshop-independent image processing software featured there – the Fo2PiX company – is no longer in business. But, nevertheless, a number of other filtering tools have become available in the intervening period, up to and including full “auto-painting” routines.

A key individual function of the Fo2PiX software was to introduce pictorial simplification. Basically this was achieved by the elimination of fine structural detail in the starting image (and the associated averaging of color across the larger, more prominent, contiguous areas of the image which remained). This was targeted – as an artistic objective – in order to emulate what traditional painters do when adopting an impressionistic style.

Nowadays much the same functionality is available in the Topaz Labs Simplify plug-in. One neat feature of this newer software product is that the degree of simplification produced has a set of fine sensitivity settings which scale correctly with the overall size of the starting image. However, one series of settings will provide a rendered image with a fixed degree of uniform simplification for the image as a whole. There is no ability to directly restrict the amount of simplification in one or more areas of the original other than by creating a mask within Photoshop (usually before launching the plug-in).

One consequence of this which occurs with images where the subject has been deliberately isolated (or “cut-out”) from its original background is that some of the simplifications at the edges may remove and/or distort the isolation.  The first two images below have been cropped from an isolated version of a starting image introduced earlier and re-worked using Simplify. It is easy to see there that portions of the (white) background have now become blocks of color derived from the floral portions of the image. By using the mask – the one which was first built to isolate the full bouquet – we can arrive at the last re-rendered version of the image included here (the third in the group below). Now the “block” simplification of the floral components at the core of the subject material is independent from the definition of the edge. This is different from, and, perhaps, better than, what a conventional painter might choose to do in portraying the same type of subject (i.e., a floral still life). More will be written later on forcing distinctions between the edge and core regions of digitally re-rendered images.

some baseline and uniform simplification

an increased amount of uniform simplification

the same  increased amount of uniform simplification, but using an isolation mask – just two steps from the original photograph

So now there should be (above) a simple slideshow, showing the starting photographic image and a set of components which rework the colors, shading and outline of the original. Generally I build a small library of these component images. All are isolated – the subject(s) being set against a white background. They become, individually and in simple combinations, the layer contents and/or layer masks in several Photoshop files. This is the means by which Impressionistic renderings are assembled. Some components are quite subtle; others more complex.

Currently there is no finished rendering accomplished within this project. I will post one or more of those later.