You can't then 'Undo' that step to return to the unprocessed version, which puzzled us initially. When you're happy with the settings, clicking Run processes the image to display the results. Unlike other tools, you don't just get to select a material: you can set the canvas scale, pattern, brightness and position of a light source, prominence, distortion effect and more. There's almost as much flexibility in defining the canvas. If you need more control, the Home Deluxe and Business editions of the program also allow you to define the stroke direction.
Whatever you're doing, the preview window updates almost immediately to show the results. You can then manually tweak these by dragging any of 8 sliders - Simplicity, Saturation, Max Stroke Length, Stroke Thickness/ Intensity/ Curvature, Wide Background Strokes, Random Strokes. This didn't look too dramatic for us, but if you're not happy there are more than 40 preset styles to choose from. Open an image and the program immediately applies its default painting effect to a small preview area. AKVIS OilPaint is a stand-alone application and Photoshop plugin which can transform digital images into realistic oil paintings.
