[Monte Williams]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Joe Moore

Cool. Quick tip, if you zoom out the paint brush strokes will be very abstract, if you zoom in, the painting gets more refined and detailed.

Boy howdy! That really does make all the difference. I find that most any brush tool works when you're super zoomed in, but my favorite (and remember I'm using my phone, which seems to have different brushes, or at least different names for the brushes) is "Small Fill".

The first photo I tried to play with using this tool was that Lone Ranger portrait. Here is the original, pre-PaintCan:

And here again is my first PaintCan attempt:

I like it more now than I did at first. His face looks nice and muted, especially.

But the sloppy bits bugged me, particularly his hat, so I kept experimenting and finally tried the zoom-in tip you'd suggested. I was very pleased with the results, until realizing it was a bit too sharp; it arguably doesn't look like a painting, just a blurry toy photo:

So then I gently went over it with a soft brush:

I think that's my favorite of the bunch.

Next, it occurred to me that if I purposefully left a portion of the photo sloppy or even blank, it'd look like a painting in progress, which might help sell the paint gimmick a bit. One thing I like about the app is that it's so quick and painless to save a photo during any given step along the way; once I was done, I'd saved what almost adds up to an animated sequence detailing the "painting" process:

I have two other sequences, but they're about a dozen photos each, and I've taxed everyone's patience and endurance sufficiently for one night.

Thanks so much for mentioning the app, Joe!