Photo-Art

[raven4ns]

Hello,
I am looking for a program that will create photo-art yet allow me to have a good bit of control over how it looks if I want to. I have tried Topaz simplify and wasn't fussy about it, I also tried DAP and liked it but wanted to have more control than what it offers. The auto nature of a painting program is appealing but I want to control the strokes, intensity, direction etc if possible. On my website I tried using PS CS2 and perhaps this is the way I will have to go, however, I am not a painter just an amateur photographer.
If anyone is using software that will allow you to do what I have stated above, please let me know. I find PS difficult to use with a steep learning curve and if I am away from it for a while I need to relearn it all over again. Any and all help is appreciated especially from those who have already gone through what I am attempting to do. Thank you.

[NicoleScraps]

Have you tried Photoshop Elements, as opposed to full photoshop? It has a ton of stuff like that built right into it and lots of sliders to change the look.

[LeeR]

You may want to try Paint Shop Pro. It does many of the things PS does, but is set up a bit more for artists. You may find you have more of the controls you are looking for in that program. There are several people on this forum who use PSP almost exclusively and swear by it. Plus, it is a fraction of the price of PS.

[mad editor]

I use PS at work an have an old version of it on my home computer as well. I also have Elements at home. Although elements does not have the masking element, there is a way you can do it. And you can't manipulate curves as well as you can in PS, but there's a free plug-in for that. PS will allow you to work in CMYK and RGB while Elements doesn;t have the CMYK option. But unless you are doing four-color publications, etc. you do not need CNYK. And Elements is much cheaper.

[raven4ns]

I just bought PE4 and will try it to see what I can do with it. Thank you for your suggestions.

[raven4ns]

I requested the information from Corel about the algorithm that handled the auto-paint in Painter 11 vs PE 4 and was told it was the same. For those people who only want the auto-paint feature you may as well get it with PE 4 and save yourself some money and a less complex piece of software. I hope this information might be of some use to those trying to decide between the two auto-paint features in these programs.