GO WITH THE FLOW

Dick Pountain /Idealog 338/ 05 Sep 2022 03:37

In last month’s column I explained how I came to terms with, and eventually even to love, taking photographs with my smartphone rather than a proper camera. I take even more pictures now because the phone is always ready in my pocket. What hasn’t changed is that I select a very few of the pictures I take to post online, on Facebook more than Flickr nowadays (since the latter was taken over by SmugMug) and recently more on Instagram too. Before posting them I examine these pix in a photo editor and often lightly tweak them, by cropping (I’m not squeamish about that) and maybe a touch of exposure correction and/or sharpening. Fewer still get selected for heavier mangling, with special effects making them into graphic art, to look like a painting or a poster.I started learning such post-processing tricks many years ago under Windows 3 in Paintshop Pro, then Adobe Photoshop Elements (which became so bloated and that I stopped at v5, hacking my install onto each successive new PC). When I jumped ship to a Chromebook I needed to find a photo editor with a layer-based approach the equal of Elements and SumoPaint did that for a  while until its publisher switched to a rental business model and removed the feature I used most. 

I tried AutoDesk Sketchbook which is a good-looking app with a clever user interface – so clever that it still baffles me and I use it only occasionally. Then a professional photographer friend introduced me to Snapseed, which he uses on an iPad but I’ve found is just as good on Android. It too has a clever, minimalist user interface that avoids lots of cascading menus, but its UI clicked with me instantly, and for those minor touch-up jobs it’s the best tool I’ve ever used. The exposure controls are superb, particularly an ‘Ambience’ slider which works subtle magic on the ‘feel’ of pictures, and a ‘Details’ slider for structural sharpening that’s as good as the Nik Filters I miss so much from Photoshop days. However it doesn’t support multiple layers – only a rather limited ‘double exposure’ – and its handling of text is limited and idiosyncratic. 

I happened across an online magazine article which tested what it claimed are the 10 best Android image editors and grimly set to trying them all. Most were powerful enough, but not in ways that help me: many are clearly aimed at youngsters into anime and manga, others way too complicated, but one of them called ArtFlow Studio grabbed my attention. 

At first it was more puzzling even than Sketchbook or Snapseed: upon launch you face a blank screen with a white dot in the upper left corner. Click on that dot and a very minimal UI does appear with a single row of small icons along the top of the screen, a pair of thin vertical sliders at the left edge, and a hideable Layers box at the right. No text is visible anywhere, though clicking and holding the icons does pop up a hint. 

It took me several weeks to uncover all the power I need within ArtFlow, because it’s organised in such an unusually economical and elegant manner that you need to adjust, to stop looking for items in menus. Everything descends from the six icons at top left which spawn visual palettes of brushes, erasers, smudgers, fillers and selectors while those two left-hand sliders control the size and intensity for each tool. Once I’d got my mind right, I 

began to appreciate the speed and uncluttered screen. 

ArtFlow’s handling of layers is extremely powerful, with more Blend Modes than either Elements or Sumopaint, and its effects filters are also excellent. I do miss a fractal filter that only Sumo offers (and from which I’d created a whole art-style) but it’s some consolation that ArtFlow has an unusually controllable Solarise filter that can create some very striking effects. Its one major lack is that ArtFlow doesn’t handle text at all, but this discovery lead me to make another that has completely transformed the way my imaging workflow works. 

Not only does Android’s Files App recognise Snapseed, Sketchbook and ArtFlow in its ‘Open With’ menu, but these three apps also recognise one another in their own Share commands, so if I need to add text to an image that I’m creating or editing in ArtFlow, I just share it straight into Sketchbook which has rather superior text handling, then return it back into ArtFlow.

Sketchbook, Snapseed and ArtFlow Studio are all available free for Windows too (though both Snapseed and ArtFlow require Bluestacks or a similar quality Android emulator). If ever you’re feeling symptoms of menuphobia, one of them might provide instant relief.

[Dick Pountain wonders whether, if a picture is worth a thousand words, he might submit 4/5ths of a picture next month]