FYI - Insights Right Hemisphere's Deep Paint

Available from Right Hemisphere, and downloadable as a demo program,   Deep Paint is not for the faint of heart.  This is not a plugin that will do instant FX, but one that will literally allow you to paint with any texture, depth, color, pattern, light FX and more,  all from the built-in brush FX.  You can  customize these brush FX to your own liking, then save them as a new effect.  You can paint right on your existing image, or start with a blank canvas. You can take an image, turn it into a 'brush' and paint repeating images of it.  Deep Paint can run as a stand alone program, or as a plugin from within Photoshop.  When you load Deep Paint through Photoshop's menu, it will reload all  your plugins that Photoshop has loaded so you can have access to them.  As a plugin, it works closely with Photoshop, importing the active image you have open, and then exporting it back.  Deep Paint will not resize or resample the image, nor do any of the advanced image editing techniques unique to Photoshop.  It's purpose in life is to create great looking images from a myriad of brushes, textures and all the painting controls you can imagine.  In fact, your imagination is your only limitation.

Be sure to also see my FYI Insights on Deep Paint 3D with Texture Weapons, which is for working with 3D objects.

Deep Paint has some really amazing, and accurate, FX brushes.  From textures, to metals, to inks, oils, chalks and more, you can add your own FX from scratch, or apply them to an existing image.  There is literally a limitless number of combinations for creating your own styles.  Having multiple Undos is wonderful.   Deep Paint also supports the use of tablets, and is closely tied into Photoshop, by accepting images from it, and exporting them back directly into Photoshop, or saving them as a PSD file.  Also, Deep Paint has many controls and tools that are similar to Photoshop's.  The Help manual is available from Deep Paint's menu, and is quite extensive.  It contains exercises on using Deep Paint along wtih the standard index of items you might want to look up.   Deep Paint will save in a variety of popular image formats, including it's own proprietary one of *.DP2.

Here are some screen shots of Deep Paints controls, along with brush and texture examples sprinkled throughout:

The Command Panel contains palettes for your Tools, Brush and Paint Settings, Layers and Lighting Controls. In addition to creating your own Brush categories, these categories of brushes are included: Standard Tools (53) Variatons (39) Weird (10) Natural (59) Image Processing (12) (has similar lighten, darken, blur, sharpen, etc as Photoshop) Cloners (23) Metals (15) Fabrics (15) Tiles (16) .	Double-click on any brush, and up pops the Brush and Paint preset editor.   Here, you can change all the variables of your brush.   The textures in Metals, Fabrics and Tiles are really great
The Settings Panel is a scrolling window which allows you to control Brush, Texutures and Paint Settings, including some Advanced controls for really great customizing.
You have Layers, just like in Photoshop.   You'll fee right at home here, with many of the same features that Photoshop employs.	The lighting Panel permits one to change the look, feel of the texture, direction and any effect light may have on your brush strokes.