PhotoDonut Image Painting  seemed just like one or two  popular photo painting programs that are part of a photofinishers repertoire. Take a look at two favorite image painting  programs used in many image refinement sessions on PixofToronto.com or Pixofcanada.com. 

Fotosketcher is free software which sets an awfully high standard for image painting:
 

One can draw on parts of an image using brushes set to about 20 painterly styles. And as you can see in the screenshot each style is subject to a wide range of settings. In addition one can apint areas of the image with one paint style then make the just painted canvas the source and apply a new style on the other parts of the image. S a result, Fotosketcher has become a favorite tool to add drama and style to posters and greeting cards as well as website images.

And Snap Art from Alien Skin was the first tool I used trying to emulate some of the special effects available in Instagram and Snapchat – okay not the funky vulgar ones. But as covered here in the Photofinishes, these Photo gallery  programs made refining images using a wide range of painterly styles legitimate. Here is an example of Snap Art 4 in action:

There is a sidebar on the left devoted to the different overall paint styles available in Snap Art. Then on the right siedbar is the  various control settings to customize the styling just as in Fotosketcher. Snap Art also supplies elementary masking capabilities plus overall image color settings.  So when I first  encountered Photo Donut, well I thought I have this tool already covered.

What PhotoDonut Brings to Artful Photofinishing

Here is the start screen for PhotoDonut –  at first glance it resembles Snap Art :

Basic Style options in the left sidebar and then layers and styling setting in the right sidebar. Now wait a second, layers is a step up from both Fotosketcher and Snap Art which effectively work with two layers only

Then a little more prying around and I discovered masks and special operations. And then I got frustrated because I did  not read the manual and there is definitely a learning curve to mastering PhotoDonut. However I still managed to complete some very interesting image manipulations:

Now doesn’t this resemble the Fotosketcher interface? But more interesting I found filters and effects that resembled a good portion of my Photoshop plugins like Impressionist, Flaming Pear Swerve, Fantasy Media , many of the Photoshop Filter gallery plugins, etc, etc.And I had barely scratched the surface of buiilding blocks and user styles in PhotoDonut.

Conclusion

It became obvious on perusing the documentation and tutorials that  PhotoDonut would require much more thorough testing. Reading  the documentation while following the online tutorials would be imperative . And finally figuring out how the Photodonut pricing makes cents would follow. Although there is a substantial learning curve to master PhotoDonut.; however it appears to be more than worth the while. This appears to be a  program that rivals if not exceeds Corel Paint and even Photoshop for creative photo painting.