There’s not much that’s new about digital drawing, painting, or graphic design apps, Mac or Windows. Most of the high end tools come loaded with features that require a few semesters to learn, let alone master. The recent flood of one-trick pony apps bring affordable graphic and image manipulation to the masses, but PaintMee is the first that I know of that uses the term digital painting generator.
For a few bucks you get an app that isn’t a drawing app or a design app in the traditional sense. Embedded within PaintMee takes a photo and repaints it as if the image was painted stroke by stroke, smoothly, starting from a blank canvas. In essence, the photo or image is analyzed, and then re-constructed according to specific parameters, but with vector-like precision.
The result speaks for itself.
One click gets a result like the above but PaintMee comes with many options to alter the appearance of the same original photo or image. For example, you control the Layers, Detail, Precision, Tones, Colors, type of Paint, and Texture, so each image is unique.
As an inexpensive app, PaintMee is quite versatile and one of few Mac image enhancement apps this side of Photoshop which can put some pressure on multi-core Macs. Every core in my i7 iMac gets used, and a simple slider bar determines how much (the Pro version outputs up to 128 megapixels; vs. 16 megapixels in the basic version) time is required.
That means the finished image- and it may take many minutes for more complex detail to complete- is huge and incredibly detailed. Each new painting in the Pro version can be exported as a Photoshop PDS file with layers, up to separate 128 layers on separate transparent backgrounds.
PaintMee’s output isn’t what you’d use everyday as a photo professional or graphic designer, but it’s priced more like an elegant one-trick pony app, though the price differential between the entry-level version and the Pro version is substantial.
One feature I’d like to see added to PaintMee is an option to re-paint an image in various styles. True, you can control the specific parameters of each element, but having presets that paint like Picasso or Warhol would be a plus.