Merging Painter Image with Clone Source

[JohnMayer]

There has GOT to be a way to do this. In fact, it’s probably quite simple, when you know how...

My goal with my new Painter app seemed a very modest one: to add brush strokes to a computer-generated piece of art to give it a little more warmth. I got the brush strokes laid down just fine. With the tracing paper at 10% it looks pretty much the way I wanted. Now how do I USE that image? Saving the file saves only the brush stroke layer WITHOUT the clone source, but WITH white where the source used to be, which looks pretty ugly.

If I could join the Painter image to the cloned image, just as it appears before I save it, or if I could save just the brush strokes with the background completely transparent (my attempt to do that gave me a PARTIALLY transparent image with a great deal of unwanted white in it), I’d have what I need. Since I can SEE the image as desired with the tracing paper turned on, surely there’s some way to SAVE it like that. Isn’t there?

~ John Mayer

[Christine Farrelly]

No easy way if you have painted on to the background layer (the canvas which is white by default). You would need to start again and fill the canvas with the original image, then do your paint strokes either on this layer or a new layer above.

You could try creating a new layer and painting back the original with the soft clone brush.

Christine

[JohnMayer]

Thanks, Christina. I see my error NOW. I did try something similar to what you suggest. First I raised the canvas to a watercolor layer (?). Now, why I couldn't just, say, duplicate the canvas layer, or raise it to a default layer (apparently the default layer is the watercolor layer, which then must be CONVERTED to a default layer [?])? Anyhow, once I created a duplicate of my brushstrokes I then created a new layer for the clone source image, so that I'd be able to adjust it to 90%, figuring that would be comparable to the clone viewed through a 10% tracing paper.

Eventually I figured out that I couldn't clone the source in any fashion, either with a clone brush or a restore brush on a layer; that had to be done on the base canvas, which I hoped could THEN be raised to another "watercoler" level. First I just tried letting autopaint fill in the canvas, since I've seen that, if you let it run long enough, it will, in Essentials, render all the way back to the original. But in Painter it would never go past filling half or less of the canvas. So I tried the restore brush, manually. That went very slowly and seemed to quit functioning altogether after a few very slow strokes. Also, for reasons not clear to me, it added impasto to my original image, smearing the colors, despite all my efforts to kill all impasto settings and, also, to clear impasto effects.

Finally I discovered the Fill function, which brings up a dialogue box with an option for Fill with Clone Source. That worked great. So then I raised that level to tinker with it. Eventually I found that the brush work layer on top at about 50% and the clone source below at around 90% (I forget the exact figures) worked pretty well, though not nearly as well as simply recording the effect with tracing paper would have (?). And it saved in layers as a .psd. But the Photoshop version was still further from my Painter work. Some areas had NO brush work, whereas one of my figures was covered with ugly grey lines. By making three layers of the original piece and two of the Painter brush work, tinkering with the values of each one and doing some touch-up, I was able to come up with something I was able to use, but only barely and certainly not worth all the effort I put into it.

I continue to think that Painter is a great program with a poorly designed interface. Every review mentions its STEEP learning curve. I'm sure SOME of that is unavoidable, but I think a redesign could make it accessible to a LOT more people. No skin off my nose; I don't do art for a living any longer and I've gotten by fine without Painter up to this point and can continue to do so for those rare occasions when I need to do a piece.

On the other hand, if I SHOULD buy Painter and, eventually, get the hang of it, there'll be a special glee in knowing I'm one of the special few and that I have an advantage over the hoi polloi.

[Christine Farrelly]

If you seriously want to learn Painter I would suggest subscribing to Lynda.com they have a complete training course. You can subscribe for a month and watch the movies then cancel if you want to. So long as you have the time you can get excellent value for one months subscription.

Christine