Dullness of Watercolor Presets

Many of the watercolor presets, such as those of Watercolor 2 in the defaults, appear to lack opacity. They appear as if they were covered in a translucent film. Not all real media watercolor is this matte. They resemble other presets with positive transparency (e.g. 20% etc). Changing the Paint Brush Setup to paintbrush load changes this, but then they do not resemble watercolors.
Is there away to increase the "opacity" and/or saturation in a controlled fashion to yield more lively watercolors ?

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  • Have you looked at the Watercolor3 category in the 4.0 Collection? And the Wet_Media_Watercolor category in the CD_hand_drawn_media collection? I'm curious what you think about any of those presets?

    You can always boost the saturation for any paint preset. Goto the Paint Color Source control panel. There are 2 Color Mode options called Max Sat_LHS_Color and Max Sat_VHS_Color. Those Color Type options will lead to brightly saturated paint colors.

    If that's too much of a boost, set the Color Mode back to Color. Then set the Start Option control to ClipSat (clip saturation), and the increase the Offset control. The Offset control adjusts whatever color parameter is specified in the Start Option control. It defaults to ClipLum (clip luminance), but you can set it up so the Offset is adjusting the saturation.



    You can extensively edit any paint preset, so i'm sure there's a way to build paints with the look you are going for. If nothing i mentioned above seems to be doing it for you, post an example or 2 of the kind of paint effect you are going for from a real watercolor painting, and we can try to post a few presets for you that emulate that style.
  • Thank you for the reply !
    However, none of the changes you suggest make much difference. The only thing that helps is going to Image Operations and using the Optimize preset. Most of the watercolors when used in the autopaint mode look more like chalk than watercolor. I will try to post some examples as the week goes on.
    • Nora, In great part you are correct. The difference is in the way analog and digital colors blend.

      However, to state that the only thing that helps is an optimize preset and then dismiss that as part of your process seems in itself to misunderstand the power of the digital tool. The digital process is different, but you can certainly get the result you are aiming at. Further you could build a custom adjustment using the adjust tools and the imops and save this as a Paseq or a paseq step.
    • Please post a few examples of what you are looking for.

      Given any 10 people, if asked for what they think are a good water color or oil paint preset looks like, you usually get 10 different answers.

      The paint synthesizer is extremely versatile. So i think there's a way to program up the particular look and feel you want if you can get that across to us with an example or 2.
  • Is this what you are looking for? Or if not, how should it be different?

    • Yes. This is a look I would like to emulate. How did you do it ?
      Here is what I have found so far:
      1. To get the W/C resets to work well, assuming that you want some detail, first simply do autopaint at the default settings. Then, when canvas is covered, change to Paint Fill Apply, Nib Masking as local image range.
      2. Optimize in Im/op.
      Below are 2 attempts using Ragged Flat Rim from the default Watercolor2 set. The first uses the technique above in (1). Note the chalky appearance. The 2nd add step (2) and looks great. These observations appear to hold for most of the watercolor presets.

      fixsa1.jpg

      fixsa2.jpg

      • I just used one of Craig's CD_hand_Drawn_media collection wet_media_watercolor category presets, and did a little minor editing to it.

        You said you wanted to have better color saturation rendition in the painting, so i used the Paint Color Source controls to boost the saturation used in the paint coloring.


        I set the blend to 100% in the Paint Fill Apply control panel and turned off Transparency, since you said you didn't want any effects like that. The original preset was modulating the blend with the pen pressure, so i turned that off. Anything modulated with pressure is typically going to default to 50% modulation if you are using a mouse or auto-drawing.

        I did use the Local Image Range option for Nib Masking as you mentioned, to get a tighter painting with better rendition of source object features. You can control the tightness for this by adjusting the Path End Local Color Range parameter, so i set that to 100. That tightens up edges but still lets them fill in when painting over a white background, which is what i was doing with the example above. We should probably add a separate color range parameter directly in the paint fill apply control panel for the nib masking, but it uses the local color range value in the path end control panel right now.


        I'll add something to our feature list for the future that would allow for a non-linear color tone curve to be programmed into a paint preset. Probably a new control or 2 in the paint color source control panel. That would give you more control over boosting the color contrast rendition of a paint preset. So you could tweak more directly the color and tone reproduction properties of any given paint preset.


        With any project i'm doing for real, i always work with various image processing enhancement presets to give subtle contrast and coloring and edge sharpening boosts after i'm finished with my initial image generation steps. Things like the image compressor, and the Blur ip op with Edge1 compositing. Sometimes i add a little gradient lighting if i want a more textured surface appearance for the paint. Those tools are there to use and are great post processing enhancement steps to add punch to most paint or visual processing effects.
    • Original photo is below- it is quite saturated.

      fixtiny.jpg

      • Nora,

        You do know that you can save your preset edits (change to paint fill apply and nib masking as local) as a new preset, right?

        just export the preset with a new name after you have made your adjustments.

        anyway attached is a preset that might help you with making your own WC paints. An example of the result is below:

        Mikeswatercolor210.zip

        • the same preset as applied to the source image vs a blank canvas

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