Late summer this year, we shipped our largest “invisible” update to ArtCard, Waterbrush and Oilbrush. Our apps’ rendering core were updated to give you the following improvements:
Four Times Higher Resolution
We increased the resolution from a limit of 16 megapixels to a massive 64 megapixels for image exports. Having four times as large of a resolution allows us to depict four times as much specifics in your digital masterpieces. Thus, you can see more details in the motif or style specific elements such as a smudged pencil stroke or the relief of an oil painting.
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True Blacks & Brilliant Whites
The human eye can distinguish up to 10.000.000 different colors. Unfortunately, our old rendering core was only able to represent a fraction of these colors for several reasons. A computer often thinks of a color as a mix of red, green and blue colors (a.k.a. RGB color triplet). Due to technical limitations, we were only able to represent 256 different variations for each of these RGB-channels. Furthermore, we also used the sRGB (standard RGB) color space, which is widely used but also only spans a relatively small number of human perceivable colors.
With the new rendering core we drastically increased the resolution per color channel from 256 to approx. 65.000. This helps us to be more “sensitive” to color changes in the input images and also produce more color variations for the output images. In addition, we moved from sRGB to the P3 color space, effectively increasing the number of colors by 25%.
HEIF, JPG, PNG and TIFF
We, at Digital Masterpieces, value quality and really had a hard time to only support .JPEG files with a quality set to 80% in our old rendering core. Nevertheless, it was a good trade-off between quality and space on disk, which is very crucial for many users.
With the new rendering core, you can now adjust your export settings according to your needs. Using our apps in digital production? No problem, simply choose TIFF 16 and export your 64 MP digital masterpieces uncompressed. The result is a high-definition, uncompressed image that takes more than 500 megabytes on your device. Most of our users most likely don’t need that extra bit of quality, but prefer to save storage space. No problem: you can use the High Efficiency Image Format (HEIF) that will only cost something like 3 megabytes for the very same image, and still feature a lot of fine details and barely visible compression artifacts.
With the new settings dialog, you can choose between resolution, file format, quality settings, and DPI, whether you want to keep the location information or even add yourself as the creator of the image.
Improved Effects
All the above described extensions changed quite a lot on the actual implementation of our effects. Thus, we invested a lot of time to adjust and re-create our signature effects to look even better with the new rendering core, while still being familiar or similar at its core. Many days of research and countless hours of style comparisons resulted in new, enhanced, and fantastic effects that shine on your iPhone, iPad or Mac or as a large-scale print on your wall.
Transparency Support
Our old rendering core simply replaced every transparent pixel by a black one. This was not very appealing, and effectively rendered our app useless for creating stickers or for using it as a tool for collage generation. With the new rendering core, we treat the transparent pixels now like they should be treated: with care and special focus. The results are now much more appealing in images, but that’s not all, yet. We are currently working on better workflows that allow to create stickers and cut-out art pieces with our apps.
What's next?
ArtCard, Waterbrush and Oilbrush have already gotten new updates, and Graphite, Clip2Comic as well as BeCasso will follow this year. Besides the already outlined new features, our new rendering core massively shortens the time for implementing new features that you have requested in the last month. We are working hard on shipping the rendering core updates as soon as possible, to start working on new features that will help you on your creative journey with our apps.
BeCasso
Clip2Comic
Graphite
Waterbrush
Oilbrush
Artcard