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PhotoPaint filters

bob

It's better to have two hands than one glove.
Does there exist somewhere a filter/technique/whatever compatible with Corel PhotoPaint that does a fine art transformation. Something like the Oil Paint filter from Filter Forge, only one works at something more than glacial speed?

The Filter Forge item produces perfectly acceptable results but it's so abysmally slow that it's utterly useless for anything much larger that a 92ppi 4"x6" snapshot. I set it to work on a 150ppi 16"x40" image and it ran for six hours before I stopped it out of frustration.

Any of the Filter Forge products that actually do something I'd want to do seem to be unusably slow. The ones that I'd never use for anything seem to run lickity split. This, of course, is the way of the various gods of perversity.

Nonetheless I need a filter or technique or something that renders a photo into a reasonably realistic painting. No impressionism, cubism, pointillism, whatever. The object is to render the subject is such a way that tends to preserve detail but your first impression would absolutely not be a photo.
 

jiarby

New Member
Rendering is a processor intensive thing no matter what application you use. You gotta max out on RAM & processors (dual quads!)

Since Time is Money that must mean that the reverse is true...

Getting faster cost money. If you want to save some time you should start spending money.

Some folks have more time than money, and some have no time but tons of dough. Which one are you??

Photoshop on a monster design station running Filter Forge would be the way to go.

Haven't seen filters for CPT, but would be interested myself...

I have more time than money!
 

bob

It's better to have two hands than one glove.
Rendering is a processor intensive thing no matter what application you use. You gotta max out on RAM & processors (dual quads!)

True to a point but the Filter Forge efforts are the results of amateurs working at full capacity. I have no doubt that someone who actually knew what they were about and was capable of writing commercial grade code could improve the miserable performance some orders of magnitude.

At any rate this doesn't solve my problem. I have what I have and I need something that will work with what I have.
 

ChiknNutz

New Member
I'm not 100% sure, but as was mentioned, the AlienSkin SnapArt would be my first best guess. The other AlienSkin products work with Corel, though some of the effects are better used with PhotoShop (layer issues specific to PhotoShop).
 

Fred Weiss

Merchant Member
A few suggestions for using Filter Forge with large files:

  • Not all filters are created equal. Those which use lighting and blurs are slower than those that don't.
  • Anti-aliasing is commonly defaulted to. Turning it off when rendering will reduce render times dramatically.
  • Render times are improved by using Filter Forge as a free standing program rather than as a plugin because more memory in available.
  • When rendering, be sure to select only an 8 bit per channel color depth. Greater depths = larger, slower renderings.
In the file attached, I rendered the image at 3,600 x 3,600 using Filter Forge and this filter. I followed the above listed guidelines and the rendering took just under five minutes on a quad core with 4 GB of RAM. My image size is about 90% the size of yours so it should be fairly comparable. Even allowing for a single core machine and the slightly larger pixel dimensions, I would expect a render time on your machine of less than 20 minutes. Attachment #1 is the original and #2 is the rendered version ... both scaled down for display in this post.
 

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  • raspberries2.jpg
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bob

It's better to have two hands than one glove.
The AlienSkin SnapArt is exactly what I'm looking for. Not only does it produce the desire effect, it manages to complete the task in my lifetime.

Thanks...
 
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