Topaz Labs Impression 2 — software that creates painting effects from photographs — a review

© 2016 Peter Free

24 June 2016

 

In tactless (but accurate) plain talk — lousy

If you have genuine artistic instinct, Topaz Labs Impression 2 is a loser.

Ordinarily I like Topaz products, but this one basically takes a bunch of (apparently useless) coding from previous iterations of one thing or another and sticks them into a “photo paint” application that does not come close to imitating interesting painting styles.

If you are a painter trapped in a photographer’s brain, give this software a miss.

 

Plenty of online examples

This application is so relentlessly bad that I did not take the time to show you samples of its results. Instead, just skim through some of Topaz’s own postings. Then look at a few of the (supposedly independent) online reviews that exist.

See what I mean?

Most self-respecting painters would run from such unappealing blandness.

 

A more workable alternative application — for a Windows PC —DAP

Even though I think that Chance Media’s Dynamic Auto Painter (version 4.2) provides far too little artistic control, it is capable of generating output that looks similar to some of Impressionism's masters (and after). It also does a credible job of imitating realism and pop art.

On the negative side, there is frustrating sameness to the results generated from within each DAP paint-style category. This is the lack of control that I found so constraining that I no longer use the product. But even so, DAP much exceeds Topaz Impression’s visually boring output.

If you are on an Intel-based (Apple) Mac computer — Chance Media says that you can use DAP, provided you download an application called “Wineskin” to make it work.

 

The moral? — Topaz Labs should not have bothered with Impression 2

If one cannot surpass Chance Media’s credible, but artistically frustrating DAP attempt, one should (arguably) get out of the game.

In most endeavors, one looks to one’s competitors to see where the performance standard is. Topaz Labs apparently did not.