Can this "Vector Style" be achieved in Affinity Photo with no Oil Paint plugin?

[TeryFlip]

Hey all,

 

I saw this great tutorial on how to turn your photos into a great vector looking piece. Unfortunately it's done in Photoshop. Is there an oil paint like filter in Affinity Photo to pull off this effect with such ease?

 

 

[GarryP]

These threads might be useful:
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/74142-anyone-know-how-to-re-create-obama’s-hope-poster-design/
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/151099-movie-poster-effect/

[iconoclast]

Hi!

Didn't watch the whole tutorial, but the basic thing of the effect seems to be a posterisation. So take a look at the "Posterise" filter in Photo.

You could also try the "Threshold" filter. You will get a black & white image then. You can colorise it with the filter "Recolour". You have to increase the "Lightness" there to recolour the black areas. With the other two sliders, you can adjust "Hue" and "Saturation" of the wanted colour.

But G'MIC is a verry fine plugin, I can recommend too.

But this all will end up as a pixel image anyway. If you want to get a vector image, you could autotrace your image with f.e. the free vector graphics program Inkscape. Affinity Designer can't do this at the moment. The advantage of vector graphics is that you can up- and downscale them without a loss of quality.

[TeryFlip]

Yeah was planning to find an auto tracer after doing this. Would be less tedious. I’ll check out the tutorials posted and do the stuff you suggested. Maybe I’ll start with something simple to understand the mechanics of it all.

[iconoclast]

Not to forget, for the dirty texture, you can use a texture you like (you can find a lot of cool stuff at https://texturelabs.org/) lay it as a layer above the image and apply a blend mode to that layer.

[lacerto]

Instead of Hard Mix blend mode (with fill color), I would use the Black and White Adjustment and then Posterize Adjustment with exact number of tones to be used with the effect, and then apply the Gradient Map. Having a HSL filter on top of that allows quick change of hues. Applying Levels and Shadows & Highlight Live filter would control general distribution of shadows, midtones and lights, and Median Blur could be used to smoothen the shape edges. 

[TeryFlip]

These are all great replies you guys thank!

@Lagarto This is pretty close but I'm noticing that multiple oil painting instances give a specific vector line look. How would we solve that with the pictures you've posted above? ie The hair?

[lacerto]

12 hours ago, TeryFlip said:

This is pretty close but I'm noticing that multiple oil painting instances give a specific vector line look.

This may be difficult to mimick, applying multiple median blurs (or possibly other kinds of blurs) would further abstract the shapes and therefore might not be ideal tools; what works best depends also partially on the original image. There might be point in doing the actual image manipulation (the color quantization) in Photo and raster tools as they allow real time control with lots of variation possibilities, and then create the final image using a tracing tool to get a true vector image.

[TeryFlip]

Fair enough. I'm not looking to do tracing in the grand scheme of things. I'm ok with leaving it as a raster image, just looking to get that "vector" look. Plus running it through a vector tracing app would probably have an easier time too if I chose to do it at a later date.

 

I'm noticing that all these solutions are close but just doesn't nail the style as per the oil painting plug in photoshop. I'll keep tinkering though and glad I can get some of the way there. Maybe the cats at Serif will add that in in a future update.

[richdb1969]

I am also trying to get this effect in Affinity Photo. No luck yet. Like @TeryFlipis saying ... it is close. It looks like the oil paint effect in PS is tracing the pixels. I really hope that Serif add this filter soon. Even Photopea got this filter, so it cannot be that hard to introduce it inside Affinity Photo. 

[v_kyr]

A plain bitmap-to-vector color trace of the original photo, by just using 4 trace colors and then afterwards assigning other colors (like those shown in that PS video) would give you already this here ...

• test_4color_trace.afdesign

 

If you would now apply some fine tuning like the guys do in PS, you should be close.