Adobe Photoshop and Corel Painter are raster-based programs. This means that images made with these programs are made up of pixels, or tiny squares of color. Adobe Illustrator, on the other hand, is a vector-based program which means shapes, lines, and curves are defined by mathematical formulas. A unique aspect of working digitally is the ability to duplicate and transform images with a click of a mouse. An advantage to working in a vector-based program is that images can be scaled and transformed easily without jeopardizing the quality of the image. Increasing the size of images in Adobe Photoshop and Corel Painter is not as simple because the squares of the pixels become more apparent as the image is enlarged. The image below provides a visual example of the distortion that can take place when enlarging images in a raster-based program when compared to a vector-based program. The image in the example is a vector graphic I created in Adobe Illustrator. Another aspect that is unique to digital media is the ability to travel forward and backward through the Edit > Undo and Redo commands. The history palette in Adobe Photoshop allows the artist to defy principles of time by customizing stages to revert to and allowing steps to remain while those done before or after are undone. Layers have the ability to be hidden and revealed as the artist works. Digital media can also be a timesaver through the ability to duplicate an image, selection, or layer in a simple copy/paste step. What would take hours if not days to reproduce in traditional media, takes all but a few seconds to replicate in digital media. The duplications can be used to test out various color schemes, compositions, or effects without the artist being committed to any one thing.
Adobe Photoshop comes packed with filters and effects that can transform images in a single step. Photoshop Filters are organized into eleven categories: Artistic, Blur, Brush Stroke, Distort, Noise, Pixelate, Render, Sharpen, Sketch, Stylize, and Texture. The following are screenshots of some of the various filters within each category. Some remain full-color while others are converted to the foreground and background colors the user specifies. The portrait on the right of this webpage was made using the various filters and tools Photoshop offers. The original image is a digital photograph I took of myself.
In addition to its many image filters, Photoshop offers an assortment of image editing and photo retouching tools. These include the red eye removal tool, the healing brush, the clone stamp tool, the dodge and burn tools, among others. Photographers and Artists can easily edit and adjust the brightness, hue, saturation, levels, and color balance through Adobe Photoshop's Adjustment menu. Photoshop offers an array of tools that are useful to both the novice and master digital artists. I have only briefly summarized some of the aspects of it, and the advantages can only be experienced by using the program yourself.
One of the features that makes Corel Painter unlike any other graphics program is the variety of brushes available and their similarity to traditional media. Corel offers a brush guide on their website as an outline for the capabilities of each brush. Corel Painter is probably the digital program most like working with traditional media. It takes into account the behaviors and qualities of traditional art materials and does its best to simulate them on a digital canvas. Surfaces and paper textures are also customizable and able to emulate the "real" non-digital surface quite acurately.
One of the best examples of Corel's ability to accurately simulate a traditional art material is the "Artist Oils Painting System" which is the feature focus on the Corel website. Corel describes it as "milestone in the evolution of digital art" with its ability to capture the qualities of real oil paint. Corel Painter includes preset Artist Color sets which match the exact pigment and color name of a real tube of oil paint. The Color Mixer digitally mixes two or more colors just as you would in traditional media. Unlike any other graphics program, Corel Painter gives you control over the wetness of the paint, the clumpiness and bristling of the brush, the amount of paint loaded on the brush, and the behavior of the brush with the materials already on the canvas. With new versions being regularly released, Corel is on a constant mission to offer artists the experiences they have in traditional media when working in digital media. A variation of Adobe Photoshop's filters are Corel Painter's cloner brushes, though the program does have its share of image filters. Cloners recreate a source image using a brush you specify. You can recreate an image or photograph to look like a watercolor painting, acrylic painting, ink drawing, or even emulate a master artist's style. Corel Painter offers artist brushes that can reproduce the style of Vincent Van Gogh, Georges Seurat, and the movement of Impressionism. These styles in addition to other artists', like Andy Warhol for example, can also be recreated in Adobe Photoshop using mutiple filters and effects. Corel Painter comes packed with preset brushes for these artistic styles.
I was able to recreate Andy Warhol's signature style using a few features found in Adobe Photoshop. I first opened up the photograph of myself and went into the adjustments menu. I chose the option "Posterize" which reduces the amount of levels of the image to the number you specify. I chose 4 and then applied a gradient map to the image for the colors. I also adjusted the hue/saturation, which can also be found in the adjustments menu, to test out different color schemes. Below are the images I created.
There are also several graphics programs circulating stores and online shops that covert one of your images into an instant "Andy Warhol". The "Andy Warhol Replicator" is an example of one of these programs and is marketed by claiming "with a single mouse click you can create a Pop Art piece of art in the famous Andy Warhol-Style".
My point in discussing this is not to encourage copying master artists, but to show that something done exclusively in traditional media, without the use of a computer, can be recreated digitally.
In addition to the many programs available to artists today, there are also tools such as tablets and tablet PCs that allow artists more stability and precision when working digitally. Andy Warhol found the computer mouse awkward in his first encounter with the Amiga and spoke of his desire for a light pen. Today, Wacom has become the leading company in providing such technology to artists, photographers, and designers. The tablets come in a range of models and sizes to fit various needs and requirements. Using Wacom's patented cordless battery-free penabled technology, the artist is freed from the restrictions of a computer mouse. Should the artist still feel uncomfortable, Wacom also offers its technology in the form of tablet PCs. With a tablet PC, the user can make a stroke directly on the monitor using the Wacom pen, much like working with a pen and paper. The way the pen interacts with the screen provides familiarity to the traditional artist when working digitally. One of the things I find especially remarkable when using a Wacom tablet and pen is the pen itself. It is designed much like a pencil. The tip is pressure sensitive and various stroke weights and sizes can be achieved. Flip the pen, or pencil, over and the eraser digitally erases the image just as a pencil eraser would. Amazing! I imagine Andy Warhol would agree.
