PhotoArtista – Oil Review

So, you went out this weekend and captured a bunch of photos. A few of these turned out well, others maybe not so much. You want to use these not so grand photos, but how do you add a bit of a personal touch to them? How about turning a few of those ok photos into oil painted works of art? Bust out the iPad, time to make use of a fun little app called PhotoArtista – Oil.

PhotoArtista takes any photo on your iPad and turns it into a swanky piece of artwork. There are several options on the style front. Paint styles range from those primarily focused on portraits to abstract paintings. There is a little something here for everyone and every photo type.

Once the photo is loaded up, the options open up even more. Choose from nine different artistic edging effects. Adjust canvas texture and color to add to the overall aesthetics of the photo.

The real magic takes place in the Fine-Tune option. Here adjustments take place to brush styles and sizes, stroke variations, bristle depth, and even color/tone shifting. A lot of time can be spent in this panel, tweaking that photo into something that the finest artist might envy.

All this brush stroking, canvas-painting love does have a small down side. I found that photos with lots of varying colors, or higher contrast, produced the best results. I ran a few cloudy sky photos through the app only to have images come out to close to the original photo.

Another small complaint is the constant rendering of photos. It would be awesome sauce to make several changes at once and then tap a render button to see the final result. I know the options I want to default to after playing with this app for a few hours. Allowing users to make all the changes at once and then rendering would save a lot of time.

PhotoArtista –Oil is a fun little tool to give your photos a bit of a personal touch. The app is available for both the iPhone and the iPad. Those looking for something a little different should certainly try this app. It has found a permanent place on my iPad.

iPhotograhper Tip:
I played around with PhotoArtista for a bit to get an image I was happy with on the final results. It took a bit of playing with brush strokes and variations to get something that was fun and different. I took this new work of art and saved it for one more bit of processing. Filterstorm was where the final touches were to take place. I over saturated the photo and then added a blur filter. I did all this from the comforts of my bed! Who needs a laptop when you have all these fun tools right on an iPad? Here is the result of 20 minutes of goofing around:

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