Photo Reactor

If you tried Dynamic Auto Painter you may be wondering how would the automatic painting look if it was painted in any other software, for example Painter or Photoshop, with that software own brushes. We were thinking the same during the long Canadian winters and this little robot tool is the result of that.

Let’s just start with the important message first: This is an Experimental software! It uses some ideas from our Dynamic Auto Painter and Photo Reactor in order to automatically paint partial or full photo inside somebody’s else painting software. … and it actually manages that (more or less) In order to do this, the RoboBrush sits on top of any other painting application (called HOST), hijacks the mouse and then paint with it, changes color and brush size the same way as a human may (or may not).

RoboBRUSH (Experimental paint helper tool)

This tool may not be for everyone….

Version 1.0 (4/26/2017)

Great! What is the ugly downside?

Some Examples

• as a “manual” painting process it takes a really long time for RoboBrush to paint a whole image with small details (we can even talk about overnight shift) • you can’t do anything else with the computer • …and the result may vary in a whole new scale from interesting-to-ugly…

Combine photos into a great montage with PhotoBlend

+ Dynamic Auto Painter PRO + Photo Reactor

RoboBRUSH is a free experimental software. It uses some ideas from our commercial software:

$153

$178

Automatically painted photos by RoboBrush in Adobe Photoshop and Rebelle. This was a fully automatic process and it is presented as it came out without any retouching.

What is the shiny upside?

• the process is extremely customizable • you can use it only partially as an helper tool to draw outlines, or only part of the image • it will take you longer to explore all the possibilities than for us it did to write the software • it shows you how a mechanical robo painter may work in the future…let’s call him Marvin.

Another test was to use it on already existing paintings. Here it worked rather well. We ended up with second hand re-imagined paintings of paintings (2nd hand van Gogh)….

As you can see the results are “artistic” but not necessary or always good. It heavily depends on the input photo and how long we let it run. Sometime the patience runs short… This prompts the idea that maybe it is best used only partially as an helper tool, to paint for example background colors, then finish the rest by by hand….

The first thing is, we need to teach RoboBrush where are the controls in the host software. So if we take Photoshop as an example, we need to make sure the RGB sliders are visible and permanent (they wont close) and the same for the size slider (you have to dock the brush palette to the side panel or it will automatically hide). There is a quick setup guide inside the software with pictures, but we also made a short video how to start plus some explanation of the important features (you may want to mute the repetitive song):

How to start

RoboBrush can paint signatures, background washes, details only in certain areas, it can vectorize a line drawing, then repaint it in the host … but you have to discover for yourself how to best to use it.

Do you find this idea somehow interesting? We are makers of well known Dynamic Auto Painter software that also paints automatically from photos, but it uses different approach with its own brushes within its own application (so no mouse hijacking needed!). It gives far better (and thousand times) faster results.

Next Step: Dynamic Auto Painter

It doesn’t mean we need to use it to paint a full photo, we can just have it paint only a background wash, or a background that is based on the photo colors as a starting point. This would take only a minute or so and can help with some painters block.

Where it works

We used it with various degree of success in the following: • Adobe Photoshop CS • Rebelle 1.5 • Corel Painter (the big version, not the Painter Essentials)