Lightening Up a Dark Painting

[Synthetik]

I recently was asked how to lighten up a dark painting generated by the Paint Styles : AutoPaint : AutoFill paint preset. So i'll run through a few different approaches here. My initial 'dark' painted canvas is shown below:

I'll be posting my different approaches to lightening up the dark painting as separate posts below.

[Synthetik]

First, let's assume you don't want to edit the existed painted canvas but just want to lighten it up. There are many different ways to do this in Studio Artist. I'll quickly cover 2 different approaches.

One approach is to use the Image Compressor image operation (Ip Op for short). The Image Compressor performs an intelligent contrast boost that can be locally adaptive. So it's working by intelligently dodging and burning local areas of the image to boost contrast. I used a Local Adaptation setting of 12 for this particular canvas, which would probably be a little extreme for most paintings.

The end result is shown below. The modified image makes better use of the overall contrast range available and appears lighter.

A different approach is to use one of the interactive Adjust operations. The one i picked was the Bias-Gain adjustment as shown below.

The way you interactive Adjust is to mouse down in the canvas and then move the mouse to perform the interactive adjustment. The horizontal and vertical movement of the mouse interactively changes the kind of Bias-Gain effect being performed on the canvas. I worked with this to generate a contrast lightening effect as shown below. I started with the original 'dark' painting canvas.

[Synthetik]

Of course you can always manually edit any paint synthesizer preset that ships with Studio Artist. You do this in the Editor palette when in Paint Synthesizer Classic operation mode. The Editor palette can display a series of different control panels associated with the paint synthesizer editable controls.

One approach to lightening the paint coloring of any preset is to edit the Offset parameter in the Paint Color Source control panel. The Offset parameter offsets the current paint color based on the color space defined by the Start Option parameter in the same control panel. For this particular paint preset, Start Option is set to Clip Lum (luminance). So adjusting the Offset control will offset the paint luminance. o make the paint lighter, we want to increase the paint luminance, so we increase the Offset control. I manually adjusted the Offset from 0 to 50.

Running the paint synthesizer again with the offset paint color lead to the lighter painted canvas below.

[Synthetik]

Studio Artist's paint synthesizer works by applying digital paint to a digital brush. The Paint Fill Setup control panel has controls that determine how the digital paint nib is generated.

For the particular paint preset being discussed in this post, the interior of the paint nib is generated by modulating the canvas with the current paint color using an Add modulator. This is what leads to the dark paint effect for this paint preset, it's caused by this particular Add modulation.

The Fill From controls that define the interior of the paint nib can be edited. A more typical setting might be the following. Note that i turned off Fill From Modulation and i'm setting the Fill From parameter to the Paint Color.

The image below shows what happens when i paint the sunflower source image with my edited paint preset. note that the paint nib coloring is now true to the original source coloring without any additional darkening effects that were caused by the Add modulation settings the original paint preset used.

[Synthetik]

I wanted to point out that the particular AutoFill paint preset mentioned in this post is really ancient (from version 1). I think there are much better oil paint presets that better emulate the natural organic raised look of oil paint media. Check out the Oil Paint Strokes1 category in the 4.0 Collection for some examples of some more sophisticated oil paint presets that incorporate raised lighting texturing and wet mixing.

[liveart]

As always there is more than one path to an end in SA.

My Favorite Method is the interactive adjust. In addition to the Bias gain the Lum adjust can be used.

Another completely different method might be to copy the current view to new layer and use the multiply3 or add composite choices.