Samples with Other Filters and Effects

Besides PaintEngine and Simplifier, my favorite plugin filter for watercolor effects is Outliner4 which is available from [ DC Plugin Filters ]. This too is free and for Windows.

To create soft edges where different colors meet, I use "Edger" from the preset list and lower Contrast A to 1. This is a very good plugin for creating mild outlines.

In the left image, I first used PaintEngine "mass poster" at the amount of 1.0, and then applied Outliner4 "Edger."

The image has also be lightened by about 15%.

The texture is a combination of overlay texture (40%) and surface texture (18%) using "Water Color" from "Drawing Paper Textures" library.

(Click the image to see the entire picture.)

In this example, the image was first blurred drastically using PaintEngine with "water fuzz" preset given below. Then the fuzziness was somewhat flattened out with PaintEngine "mass poster" at amount 1.0. The image was lightened about 10% too to compensate for "mass poster."

The overlay texture (50%) uses "Water Color" paper. No "surface texture" added.

water fuzz preset for PaintEngine (the numbers saved in fmachine.ini file:
1,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,5,0,200,500,23,1,-10,12,29,0,180,4294967241

First save a setting (any setting) as a preset under the name of "water fuzz," and after closing Painter, open the fmachine.ini file with a text editor and replace the setting with the above one.

The combination of settings I used for the topmost image, PaintEngine "mass poster" at amount 1.0 followed by Outliner4 "Edge" with Contrast A set to 1 works well with images that has a lot of important details.

In the above example, the photo has been given the soft flatness of a watercolor without eliminating details. (It has also been lightened 20%. No texture added.)

Without Plugins

Combining color flattening (blurring) and outline extraction is effective even when you have to work with Painter's own effects alone.

For example, you can flatten colors by using the Posterize effect. (Posterize is also available as a plugin layer.) I prefer Posterize over Woodcut (without black) because I tend to lose high-contrast spots in the latter.

Here, I have applied Posterize with Levels set to 8. To soften the result a little, I first resized the image to 50%, and then resized again to 200%, restoring it to its original scale. (This is a very crude method, but worked better than the Soften effect in this case.)

To extract outlines, I used Woodcut which was added in Painter 6.1.

To obtain both the flattened colors and the outlines, you need to start with two copies of the original image.

What you need to get out of the Woodcut effect is reasonably thin black lines. For this purpose I have set the parameters as shown above.

If you have Painter 8 and prefer thinner and crisper lines, try the Sketch effect instead.

To combine the extracted outline with the color image, I first selected all of the canvas, floated it, and set its composite method to Gel. Then I filled the blank canvas with middle gray and dropped the line layer to canvas (the image to the left). The base color of the outline layer need to be middle gray instead of white because middle gray is neutral on an Overlay layer.

Next, I selected all of the image, copied it, and pasted it exactly over the color image. I applied it the Soften effect by the amount of 3, and changed the layer's composite method to Overlay. I adjusted the strength of the outlines by lowering the layer opacity to 70%.

(I learned about "Outliner4" filter from a visitor to my site. Thank you Dan.)

(Last Modified: 2003/10/18)