There are lot’s of different approaches you can take to mix vectorizer effects into a natural image. For this particular effect, I wanted to break up the smooth gradients in the original landscape photo by adding in a stylized vectorizer abstraction of the original photo. Rather than just overlay the vectorizer effect on top of the original photo, I used edge compositing to mix the 2 images together to create a very specific artistic effect.
The paint action sequence I used for the effect at the top of the post is shown below.
The first PASeq action step uses the Vectorizer to generate a very simplified flat color representation of the original photo (as shown in the 3rd gallery image above).
I could have just mixed the 2 images together using Replace compositing and a Mix % setting of less than 100% for the Vectorizer Composite control panel output. However, I tried an alternative approach. I used the Fixed Image ip op effect, to Edge2 Composite the original source image into the flat color region vectorizer effect. My goal was to use the vectorizer abstraction to break up the original smooth contours in the original photo, but work with the compositing settings to pull back original photo detail at the edges of the artificially introduced contours.
The last 3 steps in my PASeq are just finishing cleanup action steps that sharpen the final image and automatically adjust the image contrast a little. The Blur ip op action steps use Edge1 compositing to turn the blur effects into sharpen effects.
The PASeq preset I used for this effect is available Vect2.paseq
Note that I could have dispensed with the second action step and tried working with alternative composite setting directly in the vectorizer action step. However, the approach I was taking in my work was to first generate a flat color abstraction of the image, and then try to bring detail back into it after the fact, so that’s why I picked the multi-step approach I used, working with the Fixed Image ip op to bring original source detail back into the image via Edge2 compositing.
I could have also worked with 2 different layers to achieve what I did with the Fixed Image ip op and Edge2 compositing working with single layer. The cool thing about Studio Artist is that the integrated compositing options build into every image processing effect allow you to create effects in a single layer that would require multiple layers in other programs.
