First some history.

I originally developed this painting technique in 1988 on a Silicon Graphics IRIS workstation. Then in 1989 Adobe included a very limited implementation of this idea in the first version of PhotoShop.

We applied for a patent on this method and a paper describing my paint system appeared in the proceedings of SIGGRAPH in 1990. In 1993 a patent was issued. The U.S. patent number is 5,182,548.

Two months ago I got interested in JAVA, and thought this might be a nice thing to try. I hope you like it; it's my first JAVA program.

Since that time, I've written a few other small JAVA applications, but I've stopped doing any JAVA development until the support for JAVA developers by SUN and Netscape improves. I've written a little rant on the subject.

Here's the JAVA source code for this application if you want to see how it works.

If you want to include The Impressionist application on your own pages, and paint your own images, this little tech note gives some clues.

A few commercial implementations of this system are now available. One is Instant Photo Artist from Streetwise Software, another is Deep Paint from Right Hemisphere.

A recent article in the American Scientist magazine mentions this work.

That's about all I have to say. If you have questions or comments, send me a note, and remember to visit GRAFICA Obscura for computer graphics distraction!

Paul Haeberli

P A I N T I N G   with   J A V A

H E L P