Digitally painting with Topaz Impression

The other day I met a client who was looking to get some prints done of digital images he had converted to paintings using an app.  He introduced me to the app, called Topaz Impression.  One of the apps created by Topaz Labs.  Once you’ve imported your image into the app you are greeted with just over 70 different presets, arranged in different categories.  From Impressionistic renderings to pencil sketches.

Topaz Labs have done an excellent job rendering different brush strokes and canvasses from different artists over time.  You have Monet type renderings which mimic Monet’s style or you can go a bit more abstract by trying one of the Pointillism presets.  Of course some work better than others with certain images, but a lot of the time they all work really well.  Each rendering consists of around 10 000 brush strokes, all applied within seconds.  Topaz Impression guarantees you won’t see the same brush stroke twice in one image.

With Topaz Impression you don’t have settle for what the preset suggests.  Click on the sliders icon, and you are presented with a bunch of different sliders, you can use to adjust things like the type of brush stroke, to the width of the amount of colour variation, and you can even decide what kind of canvas you want to “paint” on.  If you decide you want to use your adjustments later on another image, you can save it as a custom preset for your own painting style.

The only two concerns I had with the app were the price, and the slowness.  At $99 the price is rather steep, but if it you can get the app to pay for itself then it’s well worth the price. You can download the 30-day trial here, to see if you think it’s worth the price.

The other concern is that the app runs incredibly slowly.  Even on my Macbook Pro I was having difficulty running the app, it would take minutes for each preset to load, and then if you choose to do any adjustments you have to wait a while to see your changes.  Not ideal if you want to quickly edit an image.  I did however get the app running a little quicker once I chose to run the app in low-resolution mode.

I still have a few more day of my trial version, so will be running a couple more images through it before I decide if I can warrant the $99 price tag.

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