Presets as Musical Instruments

[Synthetik]

I recently received some Studio Artist questions via email and i thought it made more sense to try and answer them here on the furm as a discussion so that others could chime in or at least benifit from the discussion. The original question is below in quotes. I'll try to take a stab at answering in a subsequent post. .............. "I also was wondering about music and Studio Artist. A music synthesizer has instruments. The presets are not really instruments because instruments allow one to play sheet music, but Studio Artist presets seem to be the music as well as the instrument – though the original image may be the sheet music. Is there a deeper level of preset than those you have created? I suppose 'categories' of presets could be what I am thinking about but the current categories are not like instruments – more non musical random groupings. Is there a way of grouping presets into categories so that all in one category treat the image in a similar way and are variations on a theme? So there would be a 'sketch category'… and then what? Are there 'strings', 'brass', 'percussion' and 'wind' presets? Since you come from this background you will know better than I what the musical analogies might be for Studio Artist. I want a better way of defining the 'categories' of presets so that my decision process can be - which category of preset is most likely to suit my purpose and then which preset within the category will be just right? I want to eliminate the current categories and make a way of sorting presets that is more artistic and relevant to purpose. Perhaps I am not alone in finding the present categories a humorous irrelevance."

[Synthetik]

There's a lot of different ways you can work with Studio Artist presets, so i think you need to look at it from those different perspectives. Craig's new CD_hand_drawn_media preset collection was designed and is really focused on providing a set of paint presets for manual hand drawing and painting. So this preset collection would probably fall into the musical instrument analogy.

Now, there are lots of other paint presets that are designed to do auto painting. So yes, if you are examining them from a musical analogy point of view then they are in some sense musical instruments that also self play a musical composition. Although i think they might be more analogous to a jazz musician improvising in a particular style as opposed to an instrument playing a piece of sheet music. I say this because they adapt to different source images and try to paint them in the particular style they have been programed to generate.

It's also possible to configure the paint synthesizer to create totally procedural art pieces, and in some sense maybe that is the musical instrument playing sheet music analogy.


As far as preset organization goes, we take a stab at it but we encourage people to reorganize presets as they see fit. Studio Artist 4 provides some new features to do that. The new preset Favorites features are one approach. You can make custom favorite categories for easy access. And you can mix and match different preset types in a single favorites category. So if you use certain paint presets and image operation presets to build a particular art style you can include them both in one favorites category for easy access when working.

You've always been able to reorganize the factory preset organization. You can make your own custom collections and categories. You can move the presets around or you can make copies of the preset files if you want to keep the original organization intact.

Version 4 also allows you to build custom html help pages that document presets. These help pages can be viewed in the v4 help browser. They can also include command links that will load the particular preset they discuss when the link is pressed. The CD_hand_drawn_media preset collection is fully documented in this way, and is accessible via the custom button in the help browser toolbar.


Deeper level than a preset? I've discussed the concept of building an artist strategy before. There's a section in the User Guide that delves into this. By artistic strategy i mean the sequence of steps required to build a rendered piece of art or artistic image in a particular artistic style. In general you would need to work with more than one paint preset to do this. It's not a requirement, i can think of one example in particular where a user pressed the action button once with one particular paint preset, then saved the canvas, entered it in a digital art contest, and then won.

But usually you would work with different edited variations of the preset over time. Like adjusting the brush size or the path length as time passes to build up an image rendition from a rough fill to a more detailed edge rendition. Or using other effects like image operations to additionally process a painted image, adding smears, melts, lighting effects, etc. Combining together different presets that simulate different traditional media effects, like charcoal or chalk area colorings with pencil or ink edge outline effects. Or colored paint with water drip simulations. Or building a detail mask and then simulating rubbing it with ink and then simulating applying that ink to a textured paper surface. The different combinational options are endless.

[liveart]

The different combinational options are endless.

Indeed SA provides many different infinite sets. So in fact there are endless endless opportunities to explore.

In addition to the categories already suggested in the question and in John's answer and for that matter in the separate forum post on preset organization, I would point to a few additional ways of slicing the cake as it were.

One obvious but not well discussed line of demarcation is in SA is still images vs animations. Within Animations there are live streams and keyframes. Each takes a slightly different mindset and in my experience benefits from a different preset grouping.

My particular interest these past few months has been in the area of live performance - a sub (super?) set of live streaming. In this area I have been creating presets and preset collections that respond to pen tracking as well as tilt and pressure options. In a sense to return to the music analogy, these presets behave as if they were following the conductor's baton.

I agree, and I believe that John agrees, that the organization of presets needs some help. Ultimately though as John's answer suggests the relevant features and thus organizing principles are going to be very personal choices.

It would be possible to create a relational database of the presets and overlay a graphical interface that would display the presets in a constellation so that similar presets would be seen as close to the one in current use. However to be truly effective such an effort would require participation and input from a substantial percentage of the SA community. The presets would have to be ranked on several descriptive/differential parameters and meta-tags added in the custom html page descriptions.

A complicating problem is that there are close to 5000 presets and the program makes it wonderfully easy to create new ones. Making the task of keeping any initial organization upto date pretty much a full time Job.. is Synthetik hiring, John? :-)

P.S.

I do not mean to imply that an effort to improve the standard preset organization should not be undertaken.

[Florence Artur]

It's true that the current presets organization, which seems to be based on provenance or history, is not very satisfying. OK, that's a bit of an understatement ;-). I'm not sure what to make of the musical analogy though, it just doesn't speak to me. And I guess in a broader view, everybody will have a different opinion on what the classification should look like. Still, some cleaning up of the categories would be nice.

[Synthetik]

Are you ok with the way CD hand drawn media paint collection is organized?

And would some more collections organized like this be useful?

[Florence Artur]

Not sure what you are referring to. I see a category called cd_media_presets2002, where the brushes are named after traditional media (acrylic, pastel...). This is similar to the way Painter brushes are organized so it's familiar to me and easy to understand. It's also useful when the name gives some indication on how the brush interacts with the canvas: hard, soft, wet, blender...

One thing that would be very useful to me in the naming of the brushes is what kind of sources they use: some brushes are good to use with a fixed color, others absolutely need a source image, something I rarely start with myself. Some introduce some variations in colors or texture. Some follow the source image's contours and work better with high contrast images...

I hope this makes some sense. I have to admit I never took the time to actually understand how SA brushes (patches?) work, I just try them more or less at random and keep or discard them based on what I like or don't like. It would be nice if they were organized and named in a way that helped me find them again afterwards ;-)