French developer David Thoirin has released FotoSketcher 2.90, an update to his freeware Windows program for transforming digital photos into works of art.

The major new feature is a second watercolour effect (Edit > Drawing Parameters > Painting 9), which Thoirin has described as using “a loose style (with transparency)… based on a new segmentation algorithm”.

If you’re more interested in its results than the technical details, Thoirin has also posted a few examples (see below for our favourite), and even by his extremely high standards they’re very impressive.

FotoSketcher leaves most image editor “painting” effects trailing in its gorgeously-rendered dust

As usual, this isn’t just a fixed effect, and the new Painting 9 has a variety of settings to be tweaked: size and precision of paintbrush, edge intensity, number of iterations, “darken/ lighten” and “soften edges” options, and a choice of 10 textures. There’s a lot of scope for variation, but fortunately a preview pane shows you exactly what your current settings will produce.

The only other new feature is an option to disable FotoSketcher’s automatic check for updates. You’ll need to do this manually, but it’s simple enough. Close FotoSketcher; open FotoSketcher.ini; find the [Update] section; replace True with False and save the file.

This release also has a few bug fixes, the most significant ensuring that FotoSketcher doesn’t hang when trying to access a non-existent folder.

FotoSketcher 2.90 and FotoSketcher 2.90 Portable are both available as freeware downloads for Windows XP and later.