7 ms·

The hardest part was actually conveying that it wasn't just some print or photo filter, and this is something I still have difficulty with today. Curious about

• gm-conspiracy 10y ago
  Have you ever seen an oil painting up close? There was an article awhile ago about using a 3d printer and scanner to make a "copy" of an oil painting. http://www.designboom.com/art/oce-3d-printer-creates-identical-reproductions-of-fine-art-paintings-09-30-2013/ http://www.designboom.com/art/oce-3d-printer-creates-identic... Until Photoshop filters output STL files and color 3d printers come down in price, humans win.
  • dkrich 10y ago
    No, never. I just asked about it because I heard the term once a long time ago, but to be honest I'm note even sure what an oil painting is. Is it like the same thing they put in engines to make them run smoothly? This was actually a question for the OP, since he has experience in it, but I'll bite. If you use high quality paper and printing, you can make extremely high quality prints that imitate all kinds of effects like oil, watercolor, colored pencil, and sketching. I actually have quite a bit of experience in producing them, which is why I asked this question in the first place. There are many other factors besides texture to consider. Cost, color, consistency, etc.
    • teh_klev 10y ago
      Oil [0] (and acrylic) paintings aren't just flat things like you get off of your high quality printer. They have a 3D texture which you can visibly discern and run your fingers over (but probably shouldn't) and feel the brush or palette knife strokes laid by the artist. You really should get yourself to some decent art galleries; you'll then, I hope, discover there's no comparison between a hand painted or drawn picture to that produced by printer. Once you've viewed artwork produced by the human hand, prints produced by all those fancy effects and fancy papers become pale imitations. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_painting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_painting
      • dkrich 10y ago
        Does the Art Institute of Chicago, or the Metropolitan Museum of Art qualify? In fact, the existence of products like, say this: http://www.artinstituteshop.org/item.aspx?productId=931 http://www.artinstituteshop.org/item.aspx?productId=931 would seem to indicate that there actually is a pretty decent market for oil painting reproductions that are [GASP] the product of a high quality printer and that you are wrong. In other words, don't assume that just because you are an art snob who was educated at the Sorbonne and obsesses over the textures that you can run your fingers over that the entire market (or even a majority of it) is like you.
        • gm-conspiracy 10y ago
          One man's poster is another man's oil painting reproduction, eh?
          • hilop 10y ago
            Some of the oil painting reproductions on HN at downright rude.
        • teh_klev 10y ago
          > In other words, don't assume that just because you are an art snob who was educated at the Sorbonne and obsesses over the textures that you can run your fingers over that the entire market (or even a majority of it) is like you. No need to be rude. I'm certainly not an "art snob", though I did study art and art history in high school over thirty years ago. And only then to escape playing football (soccer) in PE because I took A&AH as an extra subject. To be honest I was largely bored rigid, but I was, at least, clean, warm and dry and not getting tackled and kicked in the shins. However when I went to college I bumped into numerous artists and through hanging out with them the subject grew on me as a passing interest, but certainly not a snobbish obsession as you so impudently assume. Anyway, I am just pointing out that, should you wish to inform and educate yourself a little better, if you visit an art gallery and see real works of painted and drawn art (regardless of era), you'll discover they're massively different from $18 poster prints. I don't know what art galleries you have in Chicago so can't comment. I'm sure google and wikipedia research can help you there (and if it's a half decent gallery then it'll have a wikipedia entry).
  • amenod 10y ago
    Given that he already has the robot which can paint, wouldn't it be easy (well, doable at least :) to really paint the picture instead of printing it? There is no reason why this kind of painting should be any different from the manually produced.
    • cbhl 10y ago
      I imagine that in the short term, robot-painted pictures would be more expensive than human-painted versions.
    • gm-conspiracy 10y ago
      The artist still has to paint the first printable piece of art using a Wacom tablet, and then subsequent copies can be "printed". It does not scale at all for one-off pieces of artwork.
    • angus-prune 10y ago
      There is a missing piece of automation here still. The robot can replicate recorded movements - brush angle, pressure, timing etc. An photoshop filter can shift pixels around to make a photo look like an oil painting. What nobody has come up with yet (and would likely be hard to develop, or at least costly) is a way to translate a photograph, or a photoshop filter into the set of movements required to render it in physical oil paint.
      • hilop 10y ago
        For copying a painting, you could fake it with a 3-D printer that reproduces a depth+scanned painting and a topcoat of paint
        • icebraining 10y ago
          Until we get 3D printers with an atom-level precision, you can't really reproduce a brush stroke with a vertical nozzle, so you'd need to somehow identify those strokes from the depth scan.
      • 10y ago
  • fudged71 10y ago
    OP should check out canon's Project Eiger where he can buy full-color 3D prints directly from Canon.
• gist 10y ago
  > As somebody who takes a lot of pictures, if somebody could produce one of my photos as a painting using Photoshop that was indistinguishable (or close to it) from a person, I really don't think I'd care. I think this varies per person. It's like saying that having a real luxury product is no different than a imitation. There is a certain psychic benefit you get from knowing that you have something that is real (specifically that you paid more money for) vs. machine created (or cheaper). This ironically would even extend to having a good local artist produce the painting vs. having it sent off to China (at a discount rate through a service like instapainting). Hard to put into words this concept but I am sure there is an official name for it. That doesn't mean that there isn't a huge market for knockoffs but it's a different market.
• greendragon 10y ago
  I'm more curious about what's so hard about it to convey. Wouldn't a simple time-lapse video of one of the paintings being created suffice?
• alexbeloi 10y ago
  You can get photos printed on canvas very easily already, most online photo printing services will offer this option. The hand-made one-of-a-kind aspect is pretty much the sole distinguishing feature and selling point of instapainter.
  • dkrich 10y ago
    Photos on canvas, sure. But to actually transform a photo into a picture that looks like an oil or watercolor or comic strip or what have you requires some manual use of software like Photoshop. I'll just address the real reason- printing a high-quality print (like what you'd see on sale at an art fair) is far more expensive than exploiting cheap overseas labor. If you could produce a high quality digital print for less than $160, there would be a larger market.
    • angus-prune 10y ago
      Applying photoshop filters doesn't actually require any manual intervention. The process can be entirely automated and Adobe will even sell you a licence to run a fully scripted version of photoshop on a server. There is definitely a market for posters or even high quality reproductions of artworks. There is a market for oil-paint style digital artwork, whether printed or digital. I don't believe that instapainting is trying to compete with those options. It is entirely likely that the same person would have one of each on different walls of their house, each medium has different strengths, weaknesses and roles.
• chrischen 10y ago
  I can confirm there is a market for people who want real paintings, with textures, and not just digital pictures :).
• niccolop 10y ago
  The market would seem to be confirmed by the existence of the startup. Also as others may have mentioned the difference between an oil painting and a digital reproduction is quite large.
  • dkrich 10y ago
    For some reason people who have responded can't grasp that a question of why an alternative service doesn't exist does not necessarily attempt to imply that there is not a market for the existing service. i.e., asking Apple circa 2006 why they only make desktop and laptop computers and not phones would not imply that there was not a market for desktop and laptop computers.
    • angus-prune 10y ago
      The thing is, this market does exist, and is very well served. I've seen stalls in malls offering this for over a decade, I've seen website offering this for years. I don't think anyone is saying that this market doesn't exist, just that this site services a completely different market.
• AJ007 10y ago
  One big aspect to painting is what happens when multiple coats of different colored paint is layered on top of each other. You could reproduce that mechanically but you would need more than a flat source image file.
• 6stringmerc 10y ago
  That's why I made the Thomas Kinkade reference above - basically Kinkade charged a high premium for "hand painted" works that were for the most part mass produced but touched up by a human in some places. Thus it wasn't really a true painting, but not a simple print either. From an artistic market standpoint, both the Kinkade "hand painted" works and any work from Instapaint will have an inherent value of barely anything. Maybe $5, $2.50 at a garage sale. Thus this business opportunity, Instapaint, is a very intelligent way to take nothing of intrinsic artistic value - a family portrait - and create a demand whereby there is a worthwhile profit margin. Art is a high "perception value" type of gambit. Instapaint is successful in its avenue, I can see that and appreciate it for what it's worth. Customers feel like they're getting a good deal, so hey, who am I to tell them what they're paying for is really worthless in the long run? That's sort of the lesson within Thomas Kinkade's success though. That dude cleaned up before his less-appealing business practices and habits eventually caught up with him. There's a line between satisfying a market and kind of becoming a shady operation. Kinkade's model absolutely proved demand for a "hand painted" type of thing.