Painterly Tree

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Painterly Tree

Experiment done with an iPhone photo edited in Snapseed then exported to the camera roll. I saved out two versions of the original: one that was fairly straightforward that just had some tonal adjustments with no heavy filtering; I also saved out a version with a heavily stylized lack of saturation and some tiny bits of texture. Then I opened the stylized version in AutoPainter HD on the iPad and rendered several different versions. Once I got one that I was satisfied with, I saved it to the camera roll. I used the Photo Stream feature in iCloud to move the images around. E.g., I took the original image on the iPhone. When I opened Snapseed on the iPad, I was able to see the image in the Photo Stream and bring in the image from there. When I saved my work on the iPad, the Photo Stream was updated and I opened iPhoto on my Mac and used the Reveal in Finder menu to locate the 3 images. iPhoto has some crazy things that it does in regards to where it saves files and the folders they live in. It stores them inside the app package in an arcane series of folders. Just know that you’ll need to copy the files you want from the arcane locations when you move them to a real Finder location so you can open the images using Photoshop.

Once I had the three image files in a single folder, I opened the straightforward image as my base layer in Photoshop. I layered the heavily filtered version on top of that and the topmost layer was the AutoPainter HD file. Using layer blending modes and varying degrees of transparency I arrived at the image above. The process sounds fairly convoluted, but I think there is a fertile ground for using AutoPainter HD to generate textures to give a painterly feeling to photos.