Feature: Fo2Pix Artmaster plugin allows users to finish their photos in smart ways
Motivation: The essence of Art is Expression - Smart Expression

I have been reviewing a series of what I have variously called the Artful Dodgers and the Painterly Plugins. Now I would like to return to one of those Artful plugins - and rename it as a Smart Finishing program. The reason for the name change is quite simple, Fo2Pix ArtMasterPro is a standalone program - Buzz Pro 3 is the plugin counterpart, also from Fo2Pix (it will be reviewed separately). The second reason for the name change is that although ArtMaster Pro has paint brush capabilities, that brush is one way of displaying or revealing ArtMaster Pro's smartness and capabilities. There are fill and blend tools that also allow you to render part or some blend of all of ArtMaster Pro's different source visions onto your evolving picture or canvas.

ArtMaster Pro is smart because it can see the borders and edges within your photo - detect both the color and gray tonal content within those borders and then do smart things with that info:
1) exaggerate or thicken those edges or borders;
2) erase or lighten the gray tones within the border area;
4) identify and then increase or decrease the gray tonal gradations;
4) smooth or shift the HSL of hues/colors within that border area;
5) change the thickness and/or style of the line/edge from solid to various dot dispersions.
These are five key underlying detection smarts (there are others) which ArtMaster pro uses to construct stencils which then can be blended back onto the canvas that is your emerging image. So lets summarize: ArtMaster pro uses your original image plus its image detection smarts to generate stencils that emphasize variations on one or more the key style, color and form elements of your picture. You then choose one of those stencils, change how it is to be painted or blended onto your canvas - and then either fill or paint selectively the stencil styling into your emerging/changing image. The screen shot below illustrates the concept:

I must confess I have wished for a plugin, frequently enough, that could "see" the lines in an image and thicken them so I could accentuate the elements of an image. Well Artmaster Pro can do exactly that and create literally dozens of options or stencils for you to choose. Oh - and while your up - get me an image plugin that smooths out the hues but not in a blunt posterizer fashion; but rather grades the tones gradually. Or better yet shows me a series of thumbnails with different smoothed color areas and then allows me to blend or paint the smoothed thumbnail that I like best onto my emerging canvas. That is precisely what ArtMaster pro does. It is so good at its individual tasks - I have started to use its plugin counterpart , Buzz Pro, to create layers that have the lines and/or color areas accentuated exactly the way I want in Photoshop or PaintShop Pro.

So ArtMaster pro is a paint program. The difference is that you are painting and blending together elements of your original image in new and novel ways. Fortunately, the Fo2Pix people have had a chance to work on the UI-User Interface to deliver this type capability for the past decade or so (I have seen and/or worked with the earlier versions and this is the best go so far. The UI is fairly simple yet sophisticated enough to allow for some magnificent results. So lets take a look see at the ArtMaster pro UI.


The ArtMaster pro User Interface


The ArtMaster pro program has four key screens - the startup screen shown just above plus 3 others: Adjust, Studio where the bulk of work is done, and Layout. Each will be shown in detail below. ArtMaster pro looks a lot like many other photo edit programs. The menus are thankfully simpler - just File, Edit, View, Studio and Help commands. But ArtMaster pro has most of the menu items also strategically placed as buttons on the various screens - so you may find like me, that you rarely use the pulldown menus.

In the panel on the left, there is the View Tabs which shows your evolving image (Studio tab) plus the Original and Adjusted views. Just above are the collection of 16 Art Wizards any one of which will guide you through the steps needed to create your own special image. The main pane is filled with your image as it evolves. Note at the bottom left of the main image pane are two magnifier controls that allow users to resize the image and zoom in for detail or zoom out for the big picture. Just to the right of the magnifiers are the Undo, Redo, Cancel and Reset buttons ( this is half of the Edit menu).

These buttons appear in all the main ArtMaster pro screens - Main, Adjust, Studio, and Layout. So users can be confident that they can quickly undo (reverse just the immediate command) or reset (go back to to the original state of the image as it entered the specific screen ->Adjust, Studio, Layout). Finally at the top right is the Help pulldown. It might be called the Active Help rollup.

Just as the Art Wizards guide users through each step in achieving a predefined ArtMaster pro styling, the Help Pulldown is automatically displayed and guides users through the details of each Art Wizard step. It is very hard to go awry with this kind of active help. I found that I learned Artmaster Pro very quickly to the point that having the Help pulldown always appearing after each step became a nuisance(and I still cannot find a global setting that allows me to turn off Active Help). Just hit the F6 key on the Mac to clear the Help screen temporarily.

Now before I do any work in the Studio (which the screenshot above is showing), I shall first take a look at the Adjust screen which allows users to make overall adjustments to their image.

Now the Adjust screen allows users to correct an overall image (no masking) in 3 major ways. Color correction controls are at the top left for Brightness, Contrast, Hue and Saturation. Be careful with the Contrast and Saturation, they move quite dramatically with + or - 4 settings (so 46 to 54 should be your normal operating range).

The next set of adjustments allow users to Mirror, Flip, Rotate 90 degrees to the Left or Right. Finally there is a Negative Image button that I would dearly like to use with a mask - but I guess that is what Fo2Pix's BuzzPro 3 plugin is for. At the bottom the control panel there are buttons for cropping or resizing the image - the screenshot shows the Crop button in use.

There is another purpose for using the Adjust Screen. When doing a series of operations in Studio there comes a point where I don't want Studio to take as source the original image but rather the current image as shown in the Studio view tab. By switching to Adjust mode and making some small adjustment - this adjusted image becomes the new original. I thought that was what the Stencil was for -but I just cannot get it to work. So I do the Adjust two step. This gets a new base or starting image which Artmaster Pro will use for its base blend as well as starting stencil image. So now we are ready to change to the Studio and see how Artmaster Pro does its photo finishing magic.

Studio Mode

So click the Start button and then in the panel on the left we shall forgo the Art wizards for the moment and instead do our own processing with the full range of Artmaster Pro tools - click the Manual button. The following screen appears:

What ? Where is the image - no stencil, no studio, no canvas image - what is going on? Well the Studio starts with a blank slate. If you click on the Original tab in the lower left viewer you will see the original image, then click on the Adjusted tab and you have the starting blend image. And in fact on the right side of the screen the dropdown Help is telling you the simple steps you need to take to get things started.

By the way this dropdown will constantly be reappearing, even after you close it by clicking anywhere on it with the mouse or hitting the F6 key. After awhile the dropdown help gets to a nuisance - and I can't find a setting to stop it from automatically dropping down every time you press the Manual button or choose a new Source from the Palette tab. By the way we have chosen the Source 4. So lets see what happens:
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Now we have some action. The Source viewer at the top left shows what this Artmaster Pro finisher will do. The Studio thumbnail at the bottom shows how this layer will be blended into the Studio if applied completely. There are a whole series of controls to manipulate the blend - and they will be covered in the next blend step.

Right now I want to you use the canvas painting tools to add/blend the new finishing layer to the existing canvas. Remember our canvas started blank. But we use the paint brush tool (button 3 or the Paintbrush icon in the screenshot of the canvas painting buttons) to paint the blend layer onto the white canvas. We can do a blanket fill - that is button 1. Or we can erase all the paint strokes or fills done so far with the Clear button - 2. Finally there is the Selective Fill button - 4.

What this button does is blend in the Source view in an area with the same colors where the cursor is clicked on the canvas. One can set the threshold value for finding similar colors. The Selective Fill tool is very useful in sky versus foreground or very contrasty shots where you want to apply the Artmaster Pro finishing effects selectively. Remember - Artmaster Pro does not have a masking tool; but the Selective Fill and Paintbrush allow users to approximate masking.

Finally, the most important step is to finalize your finishing when you are satisfied with the blend. You do this by clicking on the Finish button in the left panel. This allows users to stop and save the output and then go onto another image or to add another step in the processing of the image. I will want to continue with another step to add back some edge detail

But look what this first step has done. It has found the edges of the image and simplified the coloring and smoothed out the tiny detail lines within those areas. By choosing a different source one can accentuate or diminish this smoothing effect. In the next step, I shall explain more of the blending controls while adding back selective lines and details.

Restoring Details

Now I have some simplified colors on the canvas so, lets try adding back some edge details. I do this by clicking on the Manual button and then select the Edges and Outlines sources from the Palette and Sources tab. Here is the results:

Now here is the real advantage of Artmaster Pro. You can selectively choose which edge details to add back into your image. Even better those edges and lines can be Thickened, Distorted, Rippled, Shaded, Frazzled and half a dozen other stylings as you can see from the screenshot. Now Artmaster Pro is extracting these edges from the adjusted original image. What you find as you try the different edge sources, is that Artmaster Pro emphasizes different lines and edges in each source finisher. So users have a huge number of add back details to choose from. And Artmaster Pro also has a whole array of Low and Highlight finisher sources to choose from.

In this step I have chosen the Frazzled Edges sources, using 6 as the source for its contrasty tone and very distinctive left line. The Palette viewer shows what this looks like and the Studio viewer shows how the step will blend into the evolving image. But instead of filling the canvas I have chosen to paint on the edges with the paintbrush. A left mouse click will paint the edge blend into the image. A right mouse click will erase any painted on edge under the mouse cursor. Thus it is very easy to make precise corrections to the image.

There is a third way you can correct an image as you add Selective Fills and Paint strokes - use the Undo and Reset buttons. Undo will remove the last paint stroke or selective fill. Press Undo again and the next to last paint stroke or selective fill is removed, etc. But be careful with Reset - clicking it removes all of the steps taken and reverts back to the starting image.

But the most important controls in Studio are the 3 blend controls in the middle of the left panel. These controls determine how the source layer will be blended into the evolving image. Try each by clicking with the mouse and just dragging bulls eye cursor in each control around. Notice what happens. the Source changes and also the adjusted blend in concert. The Hue saturation control will increase or decrease the images saturation with vertical up or down movements of the cursor. Hue will change through the spectrum as the cursor is moved horizontal in the Hue/Saturation control. The Brightness/Contrast control works similarly. Up and down movement increase and decrease the contrast while horizontal movements to the right increases the brightness, to the left decreases brightness.

The bottom control governs how blending between the source and the current adjusted image will be done. To the left causes the new source to replace and blend over more of the adjusted image. Moving the crosshairs cursor to the left will reduce the blending to zero at the extreme left. Moving the cursor up lightens the tinting and down below the middle darkens the tinting. The Blend control is one of the most important in Artmaster Pro because:
a)it controls how the source and adjust images blend together;
b)slight movement in any direction bring about major changes in look for the image;
c)Artmaster Pro has added some non-linear blend effects at the boundaries of the control.

So spend some extra trial and error time (its easy to do given the undo/redo buttons)trying out different Blend control settings. In the screen shot above I have moved the Contrast up to a a near max while keeping the brightness level the same. On Hue/Saturation I have moved the hue into the blue spectrum and increased saturation. The Blend is 38% of the source replaces the adjusted original, but that effect is darkened.

With just these two steps I have transformed my original image substantially, giving it a simplified and highlighted styling and coloration. This is the Artmaster Pro strength.

Philosophy

Some photographers consider photofinishing with tools like ArtMaster Pro as spurious if not blasphemous. A photo should stand or fall on its own representational merit. Photofinishing and post processing as we have propoed here is at its best just "trimming and gardening" and at its worst is "derivative and untrue to the original scene". And this reviewer agrees with both statements but adds a major caveat. "True to the scene" may include an emotional and perceptual overlay that is just not captured on the film.

I remember at the Ontario College of Art where photography students were apalled with a group that were taking Polaroids of student events and creating mounted scenes. Many of those photo tableaus included images which had been manipulated with spoons, forks, pencils and erasers while the Polaroid image was processing and emerging. The results were highly stylized images that had the look of a Gustav Klimt or a latter-day Lawren Harris. They were not only striking but also expressed an overall style and hinted at the feelings behind the image taking of the artists.

Needless to say within a year, Polaroids disappeared from the Photography exhibits as interest turned to solarization and platinum wash prints. But about 3 years later, David Hockney started exhibiting Polaroid tableaus and then a whole wave of manipulated Polaroids appeared on the art scene. Needless to say, Polaroids and darkroom manipulated images returned to OCA Photography with a vengeance.

Moral of this philosophic photographic parable - don't wait for Commercial Confirmation, if post processing with ArtMaster Pro and its brethren plugins work for your expressive needs - and you can tell if the resulting images please you - then lay on MacDuff.

Art Wizards

Users may want to adopt a particular style - and that is what the Art Wizards are for. They allow you to deliver an image with a particular style like the Sand Dune or Bronze Patina which are two of the Fo2Pix pre-configured Art Wizards available in ArtMaster Pro. These Art Wizards take users through a series of steps lead along by the detailed instructions in the dropdown menu for every step. Even better, users can create their own Art Wizards by recording(click on Record button to start the process)a series of manual steps and then saving the sequence upon clicking the Record button at the end of the session. Simple to do - and then Artmaster Pro will show your personal wizard in the the list of all Art Wizards available.

So Artmaster Pro allows one to change the look and feel of a picture in novel ways. The key is that users can simplify areas of the image and then add back highlights, details, lines and edges in novel fashion. I have had occasion to save several steps of an evolving image - with each step being its own work of art. Below is how our Oak leaves ended out.

This is now available as my own, Backlit Image, art wizard.

Summary

I will confess that there are times that I have wanted to isolate areas of an image and then add a spatter look along the edges and maybe simplify the colors or add graded highlights or smoothed out the details across an image. And working with Photoshop plus detailed masks and Smart Smoother filters I have been able to attain some of these ends but at great time and effort. What Art Master Pro allows me to do is achieve these same ends in a much shorter work cycle and a broader functional/stylistic range.

The price is not insubstantial (consider the Fo2Pix Buzz.Pro 3 for the same range of functionality but less of the convenience of Artmaster Pro but more control of every step is possible- see our Buzz.Pro review here). Also you need a fair amount of computing power at your disposal - I have a dual core Toshiba at 1.8GHz, 1GB of Memory. I wait between 3 - 30 seconds between Artmaster steps for the new preview of the finisher effect. Because I use filters and effects extensively, I have learned the workflow - that is to workaround these delays. I am usually working on two images or a HTML review and an image. A colleague likes linear focus - and she works with the biggest and fastest Apple workstation to blast through these delays. Be forewarned. But also be on notice that Artmaster Pro is very very rich in the expressiveness that it afford a photo finisher - this program can become very addictive.