Written by 3 easy ways to improve your paintings in Dynamic Auto Painter 7
Whether you call it photo realistic art, photo art, or just plain art, Dynamic Auto Painter is a tool that can help you achieve great results with minimal effort and time. This article looks at 3 easy ways to improve the look of your paintings in Dynamic Auto Painter
What is Dynamic Auto Painter?
Dynamic Auto Painter or DAP as it is commonly known, is a powerful and effective way of converting your photos to art. The latest version, Dynamic Auto Painter 7, provides all of the tools needed to make beautiful, expressive art from your best photographs with minimal effort.
Dynamic Auto Painter 7 is a template based art creation tool. What this means is that you can use templates to achieve certain styles of art from Monet through to van Goth, Cezanne through to Sargent and LeRoy through to Klimpt with many, many more famous styles in between.
An added bonus to the templates and styles available in Dynamic Auto Painter 7 are what Mediachance, the programs creator, call Cafe Templates. These are templates created by DAP users and far from being of a lesser standard than those supplied with the program, many are amazingly good in their own right. Two of my personal favourites are Whistler and Facelook and we will be using the Whistler template to demonstrate the processes and results for this post.
1. Start with a Good Image
The most obvious way to improve your artistic results is to practice on good candidate images. A good photo will undoubtadly make a good artistic print providing it has sufficient tonal range for Dynamic Auto Painter 7 to be able to do its stuff. Choose a bad photo and the results from DAP will likely be indifferent or worse still, dissapointing. Quality in equals quality out.
One of the basic tools offered by Dynamic Auto Painter 7 is the Tonal Range tools under the Browse menu. What you really want in a good candidate image is a broad range of tonal values from dark through to light. If any part of the image is blown out, or there are no details in the shadows, you are probably going to want to use another photo.
So, once you have identified your candidate image Dynamic Auto Painter 7 provides some additional tools to improve it further before starting work. These include being able to modify the brightness, contrast, hues and tones in your image. Play around with these as the better the start point, the better the result.
Here’s an example of a good candidate image where we have good definition in the clouds, sufficient detail in the highlights and shadows and good detail in the folliage and building structure.
A note on size. In photography size matters for the most part. The more pixels in an image the better the detail and definition you can achieve. Working with an image of say 200KB in size is unlikely to result in a good result when editing and for this reason, most photographers will start with RAW files of perhaps 10-20MB in size depending on the camera.
In art, size is way less important as we aren’t focusing on every small detail – we aren’t pixel peeping. For this reason a good quality jpeg is as good a starting point as a RAW file and indeed, I often use processed jpeg files for my art work. That’s not to say that starting with something better is not a good idea, it is. It’s just that the returns are negligable when looking at the resulting art.
2. Select an Appropriate Artist / Template
This is a very important point. If you choose the wrong template then you are probably going to be dissapointed in the end result. For example, if you are working on a seascape, then choosing a Klimpt, Pino, Sargent or LeRoy template is probably not a great idea. Better to research your painters first, then apply that style of template to your photo, for example Gruppe.
Starting with with the right template, while not a total recipe for success, is a good start point for any project. The style of the painting ie the brush strokes, flow and paint type, the palette, the level of impressionism you want, the expressiveness etc all add to the overal effect you are trying to achieve. This is a step that you need to take your time over as it will result in the best possible result if you get it right!
In this image above I have applied a template based on Edouard Bellard’s painting style. This template is supplied as part of the core Dynamic Auto Painter 7 software suite. While it is perfectly feasible to just let Dynamic Auto Painter 7 “do its stuff”, I tend to interact with the painting process during painting so as to bring out or subdue parts of the painting that I feel benefits. I have done this here although only to the extent of cleaning up some of the looseness in the painting around the edges of the building etc.
I’m not totally happy with the clouds but overal I like the effect. I can always return to this image to fine tune it better now I have seen the raw output.
Of course it is perfectly acceptable to take this result into any image editor to play around with the colouration, detail, tonanality etc and to fine tune the result. For the purpose of this demonstration though I think it’s a good example of the process with minimal intervention on my part.
3. Work with your ART as it’s being created to make it yours!
While Dynamic Auto Painter 7 can definately produce wall-worthy art without intervention, you can improve it dramatically simply be being involved throughout the painting process.
For example, you can stop the process at any point and complete it manually. You might decide to just let Dynamic Auto Painter 7 do the basic work and then take over. Dynamic Auto Painter 7 provides a number of tools to help you do this.
You can also point Dynamic Auto Painter 7 in the direction you want it to go before it starts, for example by highlighting the detail areas you want Dynamic Auto Painter 7 to focus on. Dynamic Auto Painter 7 is a fully interactive artistic tool which benefits hugely with your interaction whether before, during or after process completion.
In these next three image I will illustrate the differences between a fully automatic painting, one where I have taken limited control and one where I have stopped the process early and manually completed the artwork. Whie the template is the same in all cases,as we will see, the results though are very, very different.
In this first image, I have allowed Dynamic Auto Painter 7 to take full control. The results are very refined because as the process evolves it uses finer and finer brushes to bring up the detail. See what you think. Personally I don’t think it’s handled the hair particulalry well and it’s a little blue in places. This later point is a factor of the colour palette chosen. Startling with different palette would give a different result.
In this next image I have selected the palette, pushed the fidelity of the image more towards Impressive rather than faithfull and hugely importantly, I stopped it after the initial process of creating the background strokes. This then allowed me to interact with the painting at a very early stage which meant that I was in control as to where I wanted to put the artistic emphasis. Here’s the result of that intervention.
In this final version I simply ended the process very early and manually completed the artwork. This has given it a raw, edgy feel which I really like.
Practice, Practice , Practice
In truth there is no right or wrong to working with Dynamic Auto Painter 7 and this article focuses on just 3 easy ways to improve your paintings in Dynamic Auto Painter 7 while of course, there are hundreds of things that you could do. It’s all about taste and what you think works well might not necessarily be what I think works well. The only way to truly improve in your methods is to get stuck in and practice, practice, practice. In this way you will begin to build a clearer picture of what works, what doesn’t.
If you would like to try Dynamic Auto Painter 7 for yourself there’s a free version of Dynamic Auto Painter 7 that you can download to try it out for yourself. Just head over to to the Mediachance website and download a copy. It’s a fully working version, the only limitation being that your art will display a watermark. No big deal really.
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