Interesting free Mac app for transforming photo into "painting"

[Guest Nowhereman]

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Primitive is a free Macintosh app, which transforms a photograph into something like a painting. The Primitive website has a link for the free download from the Apple AppStore, and states: "The user provides an image as input. The program tries to find the most optimal shape that can be drawn to maximize the similarity between the target image and the drawn image. It repeats this process, adding one shape at a time. Using this process, the program can recreate a photo with surprisingly few shapes. It is quite CPU intensive, but Primitive is optimized to do it as quickly as possible. And the output is inherently vector-based!" Instructions for using the app are on the website.

I used the photo below to try this a few times. The most interesting one is the first one, in the next post, for which I uses the quadrilateral shape.

M10 | DR Summicron 50 | ISO 200 | f/11 | 1/45 sec | Chiang Mai

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[Guest Nowhereman]

Using the quadrilateral shape, I got the following in less than two minutes.

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[Guest Nowhereman]

Using the Triangle option of shapes and processing much longer (to 96%), I got this:

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[Guest Nowhereman]

And using the Bezier shape and running it for several hours (99%+), I got the image below.

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[Guest Nowhereman]

As stated in the OP,  I found the results most interesting when running the Primitive not more than a couple of minutes — something like you might get by making a painting from one of your photographs. If you try the app and come up with something interesting, please post it here. 

Also, trying t on the photo in the OP, it was interesting to watch the early stages of the app working in that it highlighted the basis for the composition of the photo.
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Frog Leaping photobook

[Tailwagger]

Very interesting, thanks for sharing. I gave it a shot on a few recents shots that fell to hand.  I started all images with triangle, then after I got bored, selected combo or rectangle and continued to run.  As can be seen some are more successful than others, but it is certainly fun to experiment with.  

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At around 96%:

 

[Tailwagger]

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With a more painterly photograph to begin with, the results are a bit less convincing.

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Around 99%:

[Tailwagger]

Finally a highly geometric shot where I with a bit of tweaking, I suspect the results could be quite convincing.

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At roughly 98%:

[Guest Nowhereman]

@Tailwagger - Thanks, interesting. I was trying to think how this app could be useful, apart from using it just for the fun of seeing what it might do to photos. On thing it does is to highlight the graphic basis of the composition, particularly in the early stages when you run it. 

Many people paint from photographs: I did that several times some years ago. I suppose one could use Primitive to help to see how one could paint from a particular photograph. For that purpose it would be good if one could stop the app and make a "snapshot" to be compared to what develops later. As the app is now, when you see something you like and don't stop it, it goes on to a look that you might not want — and you can't bring back what you have. As the app is free, it is likely that  there might not be any features added to it in the future.
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Frog Leaping photobook and Instagram

[Tailwagger]

@Nowhereman  Totally agree with all of the above.

I too was thinking about ways of using it for something other than the occasional novelty.  Haven't had the time to experiment yet, but the most obvious thing that occurred to me was to generate the result and then overlay it on the original (at reduced opacity) using layers in PS.  Might have some value in certain situations, perhaps using it via masking for adding some depth to sky or OOF backgrounds. Dunno...