Creating an Impasto Painting Photo Effect - A Mini Tutorial

[browj2]

Gary P, thanks for the tutorial.

I'm using DPX9 32 bit as I still can't reinstall X10, and the 64 bit X9 does not have the Emboss tool (nor many others). I had trouble with the 300dpi bitmap copy. When I tried to open Emboss, it would crash, out of memory I believe (I have 16GB). The solution was to just leave the image at 96dpi.

I noticed that the image rendered in Xara was quite different from the Fine Touch preview. The photo is as shot. Here is an example:

Fine Touch preview image:



After rendering in Xara :



Embossed still look ok, but I played with the parameters to push the raised parts. Zooming in shows the raised parts quite well and the leaves show smoothing and the raised effect:



Here is another example and it is fairly close to what I was looking for. I need to do some touchup on the colours first, there should be some green on the foothills:



These are likely not the best photos to use as examples, but I want to see how they would turn out.

I also noticed an anomaly with Emboss in X9. A couple of the parameters, Depth and Smooth end up showing 1 and 0, respectively, even though the slider is completely to the right. The correct values are 100 each. See below:



A final comment, depending on the type of image, reducing significantly the Smooth parameter creates an interesting effect.

Thanks,
John