Corel Painter line and colour

I dug out my copy of Corel Painter for a bit of arty fun. I had taken this photo of some glass paperweights in my recently constructed cheapo light tent.

When I opened the jpeg in Painter, the program threw up an error code. Something it didn't like. Maybe possibly wasn't happy with a sRGB jpeg as opposed to an AdobeRGB one. These pixellated artifacts appeared in the image. Woah! Cool! I'll try and repeat this later using sRGB and AdobeRGB images and see what's up.

And the pixellation became more obvious when I enhanced the image using High Pass.

Then I ran that image through the Sketch filter. The lines were not quite as meaty as I would have liked but I knew I could sort that in Photoshop.

So I then opened the High Pass version in Photoshop and the Sketch version, dragged the Sketch version ontop of the High Pass layer ... holding down the shift key to align it smack center. The Sketch version is a black and white image, and using Photoshop cartoonist's trick, set the layer mode to Multiply. The white disappears but the linework remains. I duplicated that layer to beef up the line.

Next I opened the original photo in Painter and created a traditional letterpress halftone line effect. I loaded up a paper texture called Simple Textures, which I think was part of a Goodies folder on the Painter 5 disc. Ok, so I loaded a 50 degree line texture and used the Express Texture filter, which turns it black and white and then you can tweak the line effect to ones satisfaction. Depending on the overall tone of the original image, you may get some darker areas going solid black whereas the lighter tones are just right. The thing to do is make two versions and combine the best parts.