autopainter

We are delighted to publish Jerry Jobe’s latest mobile photography/art tutorial for our reading and viewing pleasure. This time Jobe takes a look at the app Adobe’s PaintCan app. Read his thoughts as he puts it through its paces (foreword by Joanne Carter). Take it away Jerry…

PaintCan is free and you can download it here

“Painting apps can take several different forms. There are the auto-painting apps, that apply the brush to the canvas in a specific, software-driven way. Glaze, Brushstroke and the AutoPainter series are among the auto-painting apps I’ve covered. There are those that allow you to “trace” photos, but the user completely controls the brush strokes and they can even paint completely from scratch. Procreate, ArtRage, Sketch Club, and the Brush menu in iColorama fall into this user-intensive group.

There’s a third group of painting apps which I’d call “software-assisted”. These apps do not allow for painting from scratch like user-intensive apps, but require users to touch the screen and make strokes (unlike the fully automatic apps). Mobile Monet, Photo Viva, Foolproof and today’s app, PaintCan, fall into this third category. These software-assisted apps fall into that middle ground between fully user-controlled and fully automatic. They give you more control over the result than a fully-automatic app, which can help your “eye”: the decisions you make about form and details. At the same time, they help with the brush strokes so that you aren’t immediately frustrated with lack of drawing skills.

PaintCan is an Adobe app. To me, that means it’s pretty solid, and has a team of developers that will back it up as long as the company maintains interest in it. Of course, the flip side is that you don’t have a single developer with the passion to keep it going, either”.