Appotography

Artist’s Touch for iPhone by Artamata is an application to turn your photos into paintings that also works as a drawing utility. However, the app is neither an artistic photo filter or a drawing app: both for the achievable results and for the workflow, Artist’s Touch is more like a mix between these two. As it often happens with most hybrids, Artamata’s app isn’t particularly successful in either task.

Main Features

• Up to 1024×768 pixels resolution;
• 11 paint tools;
• 6 textures;
• Adjustable brush settings;
• In-app tutorial;
• Send via email or share on Twitter.

Appotography Opinion

In Artist’s Touch, you can start with a photo from your iPhone, you can use the built-in camera to take a shot to process, or you can simply choose a blank canvas to paint on. The app gives you a series of tools (oil, watercolor, charcoal, pastel, chalk, ink, pencil, airbrush and scratchboard) which you can use to apply different effects to your photos or to paint on blank canvas. You can also choose a background color and a texture to add depth to your painting surface. Note that background and brush colors cannot be picked freely: you can choose among a list of a little more than 45 tints.

As soon as you load your photo in Artist’s Touch, you are given a blank canvas with your photo’s contours highlighted as a guideline, like in a sort of blueprint. You can enable and disable the blueprint feature in any moment. To accurately apply a painterly effect to suit your taste and need, you can set brush opacity and size. By brushing with your finger over the image, you define the areas where the given effect must be applied. For better results, you start with a larger brush and gradually diminish size to bring out the details. In case of mistakes, you can activate the eraser, but there is no undo. When you are finished, you can save to your device, send with email or share on Twitter.

As an artistic filter, Artist’s Touch remains on a rather average level: the effects are not bad, but they’re not particularly good either. The best aspect of this Artist’s Touch, which is something more than a few other apps in the same genre lack, is that you can accurately define areas of your image with higher detail. An app like AutoPainter — better filters overall, but not very accurate results — currently is not able to achieve the same. As a drawing utility, Artist’s Touch’s possibilities are very limited as well, mainly for the lack of essential features to give artists the required freedom while painting. If you want to pretend you can paint but you cannot, then perhaps this app will let you have a few moments of fleeting satisfaction — if you have enough patience to find a photo that will look reasonably good after processing it in Artist’s Touch, that is. In any case, the main obstacle to enjoyment is the app’s overall feel of awkwardness. Both among drawing apps and among photographic filters, there are other choices to obtain similar results in a much smoother and easier way. Nevertheless, even with all its flaws, a few users may find some peculiar use for Artist’s Touch.

An iPad version of Artist’s Touch is also available in the App Store.

Overall

Name: Artist’s Touch
Developer: Artamata
Compatibility: iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad. iOS 4.0 or later.
Price: £1.79||$2.99||€2.39
Vote: 3/5