PhotoArtmaster Classic

PhotoArtmasterClassic3, originally uploaded by Colonel Blink.

Free this month with Digital Camera The Magazine for today's photographer comes a program called PhotoArtmaster Classic from fo2Pix which normally sells for all of £5.99 (nine dollars in the states which suggests an unfavourable rate of exchange for the pound).

The fo2Pix blurb says "All the PhotoArtMaster products are unique as they are the only creative software that automatically generate hundreds of variants, or ‘Sources’, based on the original digital photograph or scan. PhotoArtMaster Classic 1.5 generates over 47 such Sources. The Sources, which are accessible via 4 Tabs at the bottom of the Studio Editor screen, are composed of sketches, monochrome and colour palettes, under-paintings and highlights. The 4 Tabs included in the Studio Editor are: Colours; Main Colours; Main Edges; and Hints: Photo Art"

With a non intuitive front end and documentation that consists of a silent movie (really) it offers, despite the promises, results that are available from a hundred other programs and plugins (many of the latter free). As with all these so-called art programs the better the original the better the 'art'. The result turn out to be the kind of designs that would appear on cheap table place mats in the 1970s. Once used a couple of times it is doubtful that one would go back to it which leads me to think I paid the right price for my free copy.

The program seems to use more memory than Photoshop (on my system at least) and so I suggest you use it in conjunction with a Ram freeing program like the excellent freeware FreeRAM XP Pro. from www.yourwaresolutions.com/