AI Pencil Drawing Effect

I'll talk more about Corel's Painter Essential AI effects in a future post, but for now I only want to quickly show a sample of of what can be accomplished with them.  Both the photos displayed here were shot this month in New York City's Central Park and then AI processed with the Pencil Drawing effect in Painter Essentials 7.  I found the effect worked best for me if, in order to avoid an overly photo-realistic effect, I stopped the process before it completed on its own; but that's entirely a matter of personal taste.  I've tried over the years any number of filters and presets that promised to mimic pencil drawings, but in my judgment this is by far the best.

Since all the AI filters in Painter Essentials place a rather hokey fadeout border around the edges of the image, it's best to apply the filter before cropping.  If one crops first, there is insufficient space remaining in which to rid the image of the border.

Unfortunately, if one does not already own a copy of Painter Essentials 7, which came bundled with an earlier version of Paintshop Pro Ultimate, there's currently no way to get the effect since it was not included in the this year's Painter Essentials 8 which instead includes ten entirely different effects, none of them in my opinion on a par with those contained in Essentials 7.