Introducing PostworkShop for Painting

December 15, 2010 @ 6:33PM

Introducing PostworkShop for Painting

New software for painting effects

By Marilyn Sholin

New Postworkshop is an Adventure in Filter Painting

It's always fun to find a new piece of software that let's you explore and develop ideas from playing with the power of their filters. I found this software quite by accident and have been playing with it for a while. I am by no means experienced with this particular program, but still found that quickly I was creating fun and innovative effects that stretched my imagination.

When you first open the program it's deceptively simple until you realize that hiding in the program are over 350 styles of painting the photograph. Plus the combinations of using the filters and the blend modes gives literally thousands of new effects. Mixing the effects is what creates the newest and most original paintings.

Here is a simple snapshot of a dying rose. After cropping it and using NIK Filters Tonal Contrast we have my base image to paint. One of the nice features of Postworkshop is that the "styles" can be dragged and dropped into layers.

Here you can see that I used two different filters on the rose. I could change the opacity and even the blend modes. These two unusual filters combined to create this one painting. After the filters were rendered and applied I opened the painting in Photoshop and did some levels adjusting and sharpening. Below is the finished painting.

Another image I played with is of a friends cat and using totally different styles.

Build new styles easily with the node-based filter graph editor. Or just blend and tweak a few existing styles and save your layered composition as a new style. You need the same effect as last time? Just apply your saved style and adapt it to the new image. You don't have to restart anything, you can always tweak all the parameters. The program even allows new styles to be downloaded from their website for sharing. Installing them is easy in one click from the main menu.

Check out the STYLES link on the Postworkshop site. There are tutorials there and tons of other information to make it easy to create art in minutes! Best of all, there are free trials also. Definitely go for the PRO version and skip the others. You are going to want all the power this program has to give. Be sure to also check out their tutorials and there is a brand new webinar FREE on their site also.

Comments

TaleSlinger

1 year ago

I was rediclously impressed with PostWorkShop when I tried it out. I purchased it, but I see an Issue now that I've purchased it that you should definitely be aware of.

It seems to Node-lock your registration key to your CPU. That is it registers the software to your PC, so that you can't easily transfer it to a new PC when needed.

If I had know that, I probably would not have purchased it.

Bela Biro

1 year ago

@TaleSlinger: you can easily transfer your activation to another machine, you just have to deactivate your serial on the old PC (in the Help menu).

If you forget to deactivate your serial or your PC just dies on you, you can still activate your serial on other machines, because you have three activations associated with your serial number. You can also use these three activations in parallel, e.g. on your Mac, PC and notebook computer.

And if you forget to deactivate three times or you have other accidents, you can always ask for an extension, that is generally granted.

Bela Biro
Xycod (the makers of PostworkShop)