I’ve been playing with a new app this week, and thought I would share! JixiPix Software has released a new app for both iOS and Android, Artista Impresso, which creates an impressionistic painting style out of your photos. I love the JixiPix apps for their adjustability, and this is another great one for the app arsenal. Let’s take a look at how it works.

But first, a quick Mother-in-Law update: They found no sign of cancer in her nodes, so we are all incredibly grateful for that. She should be going home today. She has come through surgery fine although pain has been an issue. My husband said she described the pain as “wearing a barbed wire bra.” Ow!! Yeah, I think men and women alike can sympathize with that. Thank you for all of your thoughts and prayers for my family around this. I definitely feel the love of my blog community!!

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming…

It all starts, of course, with a photograph captured with ProCamera. We’ve had a lot of foggy mornings this winter, and the greyish cast to the trees comes from the fog in this one.

The first step is to add some color, which is done with a series of layers in Mextures and Snapseed. This is the image that I pulled into Artista Impresso:

Most of the JixiPix apps perform similarly. You load a photo, select a preset, and then fine tune the options. If you don’t want to click through the presets, you can use the Randomize feature to randomly try on presets. You can also Undo your changes, which is much appreciated when you are playing around with options.

For Artista Impresso, once I’ve loaded my photo, I can select between the two preset menus: Alla Prima and En Plein Air. Within each menu are TONS of preset options. You can see I’ve selected “Sorbet” from the En Plein Air Presets for a purpley-pink color tone. (Note: All screenshots are from an iPad. The layout is the similar on an iPhone, but the icons take up more of the screen space.)

Now we customize! Let’s walk through the menu options. We can change the brush size, color enhancement and painted edge. This is where I go in and get rid of the annoying edge that all of the presets add. I think the edge is supposed to make it look more like a “real” painting, but since I’m always blending the output with something else, I want it gone. Thankfully, in this app, I can eliminate it.

Next we can change the substrate texture and strength, choosing between canvas and linen.

For En Plein Air Presets, you can now adjust your color palette. You’ll notice the En Plein Air Presets have a stronger color shift than the Alla Prima presets. The “Limited” style keeps more of your original color than “Full.” You can also shift the Palette, creating more varation in your output. I didn’t make adjustments here for my example.

For Alla Prima Presets, there is a different option in this location, called Artistic Finish. This allows you to modify the colors by choosing an alternate color and texture overlay.

Finally, both presets allow you to create a “Detail” area of the image. In the selected Detail area, you can select a more finely detailed brush stroke than the rest of the image. Move the center dot to center on your desired detail area, and then change the size of the detail area by dragging the individual points of the ellipse. Don’t use two fingers to change the size of the ellipse. That just pans and zooms the image (a nice feature in itself).

When you like what you’ve got, you go back home and save. The output is saved at the same resolution as the starting image.

Here’s the final output from Artista Impresso:

For me, this output becomes a layer in an overall edit. A “painted” image like this will provide color and texture variation, as well as softness to the lines in the photograph, as I blend it with other images. Here is the final image, which was the result of using Snapseed, Mextures, Autopainter, Autopainter II, XnView Photo FX, Image Blender and Artista Impresso:

I want to point out how much variation there is in the detail. Since I post low resolution images online, you can’t always see this, so I zoomed in here:

While you don’t necessarily notice this detail as you look at a whole image, this subtle variation in texture and color is what gives an image depth and interest, especially when printed. That’s one of the reasons I use so many apps blended together. As I’m working on an image, I look at the overall results but I’m also zooming in to see what is going on at a detail level.

The image I shared earlier this week, Holding my Breath, also used Artista Impresso as one of the layers. JixiPix Software has a full range of mobile apps as well as Photoshop and Lightroom plugins. Definitely worth checking out!

Enjoy your impressionistic photo editing!