Gertrudis Graphics has released GMX-PhotoPainter (http://www.gertrudisgraphics.com/), an US$59 standalone Mac and Windows program that transforms an image (generally a photo) into an original artwork. With it, artists can start with an existing picture such as from a digital camera or scanner, a 3D rendering or painting from another program or imaging application.

GMX-PhotoPainter first performs a topological analysis of the image’s content and builds a matrix of flow direction vectors. Users can then paint a few quick strokes across the desired features of their image. GMX-PhotoPainter uses this information to generate something that looks more like hand-drawn masterpieces, according to the folks at Gertrudis Graphics.

While one of the main goals of GMX-PhotoPainter is enabling users to create their own styles, there are a number of standard, “ready to use” styles which successfully imitate traditional media: Watercolor, Oil painting, Crayon, and Pen & Ink. Each of these comes in different sizes, and levels of details

GMX-PhotoPainter lets the user create her own style from the ground, with a level of customization, including the shape of the brush, texture, color sampling technique, width, length, and many more features. There are, in fact, more than 40 different parameters, organized from the most common parameters like width, length, transparency, to more sophisticated parameters like color variation, pen & ink behavior and others.

The GMX-PhotoPainter core has been completely rewritten from scratch in highly optimized C++. Also, the user interface was written using the native Mac OS X Framework: Cocoa / Objective C.

GMX-PhotoPainter requires Mac OS X 10.5 or better. A Wacom tablet device is recommended.