ImpressionFX PaintEngine Help

ImpressionFX PaintEngine uses an open ended mechanism for creating Impressionist style images from digital photos, with a wide range of effects possible. What this means is that it's possible to create many good images and also many not so good images. Reading this document will help you create better results.

ImpressionFX PaintEngine Components

PaintEngine uses several concepts operating in conjunction to do its work. In PaintEngine, a paint Application applies a number of paint Strokes to the Image. Each stroke application moves a Brush along its path within the image, using input from the image itself to guide the Stroke direction. The Brush applies changes to the image as it is moved along the path of the stroke. The strokes are applied to the image in an amount that is controlled by the Amount slider in the Application section.

Getting Started

The best and fastest way to see some interesting effects is to use a Preset to find an effect you like. To select a preset, use the drop down list in the Presets section at top of the dialog.

Once you find preset that you like, try making small changes to parameters using sliders in the Brush and Stroke sections. You can change how strong the effect is with the Amount slider in the Application section.

You can press the Random Preset to select a preset randomly from the set of available presets. If you hold the control key down while clicking Random Preset, you'll notice that the text changes to Random Params. Now when you click the button the parameters will be set to random values. Switch back to Random Presets by using the control key again.

Some of the slider controls are range controls, they look like this:



To select a range with this control, hold the Ctrl key down while dragging the slider. The values selected are displayed to the right of the controls. A blue color indicates that the range is lower to higher from left to right (increasing), red the opposite (decreasing), during the application of the stroke. The range slider for the application amount is colored gray, so that the stroke length is a random value between the selected low and high values.

Applying the effect

Click the Apply to apply the effect to the Image.

Saving your settings

When you find a new effect you like, save the settings by clicking the Save button in the Settings section. This will open a dialog box where the preset can be named. You can also get rid of presets you don't want any more by clicking the Delete button while the preset to dispose of is selected.

Photos and Images

Photographs of natural phenomena such as plants, flowers, landscapes work best as source images for ImpressionFX. Pictures of manufactured objects, especially high tech items, don't generally make good source material.

One useful approach with source photos is to copy a small section of a photo to a new image, resize/zoom the image to a larger size, then apply ImpressionFX which will add detail to the image.