GMX-PhotoPainter - Color Modes Tutorial

Converting a digital photo to a painting in different color modes

Color modes in GMX-PhotoPainter decides the color that each brushstroke will have. You can mix different color modes in the same painting project. There are three color modes:

• Automatic: The Color is automatically sampled from the original image.
• Duotone: The user can choose two colors:Background and Foreground color, and the color of the brushstroke varies from the foreground to the background.
• Multicolors: The user can choose up to 10 different colors, and GMX will adapt the lightness of the color

Automatic Color Mode

In this mode the color is automatically calculated by the Getrudis MX rendering engine, however you can define a slight color variation to add some texture and make less flat the resulting drawing. This color variation can be set in the Hue, Saturation, and Lightness channels. As you might imagine, this is the most used color mode.

Original Digital Photo
Drawing with no color Variation
Drawing with color variation

Multicolor Mode and Duotone Mode

In order to explain the Multicolor mode and Duotone Color Mode we will transfom the following digital photo to a painting using both modes, Multicolor Mode and Duotone mode.

Original Image (Eisenhower Digital Photography)

Multicolor Color Mode

In the Multicolor Color Mode you can specify up to 10 different colors. The brush color will be randomly chosen from the list, and GMX-PhotoPainter will adapt the brightness of the color to match it with the brightness of the source image.

Example done in "Multicolor Mode"

In the Style Manager you can choose the "Multicolor Mode" by clicking in the Color tab and choosing the "Multicolor" option. Each time you click in the color palette, you will add a new color to the color list. It's highly advisable to choose light colors.

In this example we used Bitmap Brushes Style (not Bristle Brush, not Pen and Ink) with a width of 10 and length of 21:The first pass was done using the pattern tool:

Then we diminished the width and length.
The settings are shown in the image at the right:

Below is the final result:

Duotone Color mode

In this mode you specify only two colors: Background and Foreground, and GMX-PhotoPainter will calculate all the mids-tones between the foreground and background. Usually the background is a very dark color, and foreground is a very lightcolor. If you choose a light color for background and dark color for foreground, the result will be a negative drawing.

Example done in "Duotone Color Mode"

To create a Duotone painting, the first step is choosing or creating a style in Duotone color mode. You can select it by clicking in the "Color Tab" and then selecting the "Duotone" item.
Right click to select a Background color, and Left click to select a Foreground color. There is a small slider below the color palette. Moving it to the left will darken the palette and to the right will lighten the palette. We started this painting by choosing a dark blue as a background color and a light yellow as a foreground.

The first brushstrokes were painted using a Brush with texture, and the Pattern Tool: with very long and wide brushstrokes.

This is how Eisenhower looks after the first few brushstrokes:

The a second pass was done using the Auto sketch Tool: . We didn't change the size of the brush.

The last step was almost the same than as previous one, except that we diminished the size (in width and length) of the brushstrokes. This is the final painting of Eisenhower digital photo converted to a painting:

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