Review: Sumo Paint
August 27th, 2008 | Published in Reviews | 3 Comments
Sumo Paint - a new online painting application from Finland
Sumo Paint, recently released as an open beta, joins the growing list of online photo editing applications that allow you to work in your browser much like you do in a regular desktop application (see the review of Phoenix here). As its name implies, however, Sumo Paint is not just another red eye removal tool, such as Picnik, Pixlr, or Splashup. Sumo Paint is designed more for image creation rather than image editing. In other words, it’s a tool for creating art. Like most of these new “Web 2.0″ online applications, Sumo Paint is free. Unlike the other photo apps, it’s doesn’t have hooks into social sharing sites like Flickr and Facebook. It has it’s own online gallery, however, so you can see what others are doing with Sumo, and upload some of your own work. Just remember: it’s very new, just released in June 2008 as an open beta, so expect lots of quirks and oddities. For example, I didn’t have a lot of luck getting the smudge tool to work. It tended to change colors randomly on me, when it worked at all. But I’m sure they’ll get these problems ironed out shortly.
Some cool, unexpected features
Sumo Paint has the usual tools you’d expect, such as selection tools, gradient, paint bucket, and so on. Sumo supports layers and blending modes, and has some filters as well. But click on the paintbrush, and you begin to see some differences.
Sumo's paint brushes offer a lot of variety
Not only are there a variety of brushes to choose from, there are settings for size, opacity, scatter, random rotate, and gravity (which is supposed to help you draw smooth lines, I believe, though it didn’t seem to work for me). This is a far cry from the brushes in Photoshop, I realize, but it’s much more than I’ve seen in other online editors. Sumo also has an ink tool (not a pen tool for drawing vector shapes) and a pencil tool. For vector-ish work, there are shape tools of various kinds, and a peculiar line type that lets you bend it once after drawing.
You can get some interesting effects with the shape trails option.
Each of the shapes has a “shape trail” toggle, which can lead to some interesting results (see above). The most unexpected item was Sumo’s symmetry tool, which allows you to draw some intricate mandala-like drawings very quickly. I used a Perlin noise filter to achieve the psychedelic background. Imagine what I could do if I knew what I was doing! I thought this was pretty cool, and easy to do.
Using the symmetry tool to create a very complex design in minutes.
Conclusion
Sumo Paint seems very rough around the edges at this point, which is expected with such an early beta release. This review is just meant to bring it your attention, so that you can give it a try. I’ll be keeping an eye on Sumo Paint as they continue towards a gold release. Look for another review at that point.
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Stumble it!
April 24th, 2009 at 6:07 am (#)
sumo paint is an amazing free website and it amazes me that you can use the symmetry tool to create beutiful peices of art, but there is one downside to it that is quite hard to use the mousepad to create pictures , but overall it is a really good peice of software .
October 31st, 2009 at 7:05 am (#)
Cropping images and resizing pictures was convenient and touching up the lighting effects as well as hues/shades looked great! Adding these cropped images and merging them was easy.There are histograms showing color-balance levels and allows visual users to edit images without fussing around with complicated numbers or values. All they need to use is move the sliders up or down.Text boxes placed on images are difficult to move around and flexibility isn’t exactly this program’s MAIN feature when concerned with movement.The way this software is displayed and put out looks just like photoshop (somewhat).Overall, Sumo Paint is like a mini-version of Adobe Photoshop with speed being a negligible problem and storage space being minimum since it is ONLINE. While Photoshop takes up a lot of space on the computer due to it being a desktop intercface, Sumo Paint is trouble-free.You cannot copy and paste pictures or texts.
After inserting text, a user cannot edit or move the text around after you deselect the frame.A user cannot move a picture out of the frame while dragging it. If they do, it will cut the portion of the picture that went beyond the page’s frame.
It is easy for them to get imported/exported into images BUT there is a limited variety of file formats with there being only .jpg or .png…for those users who DO have accounts( you can get an account for free), they have the option to DIRECTLY export to the account. However, the file location doesn’t show up and users have to hunt around their desktop.When pictures are inserted, they get cut automatically according to the page’s frame size and you cannot edit them.When you import pictures they become pixilated very easily when adjusting to the wanted image size and do not fit well.You cannot control what parts of the image are cut off or adjusted, and you cannot return the image to its original format afterwards.More color options; as users you are only given a certain selection of font colors so the appearance of the image/text is limited.
They should not limit all the programs to the pro-version.
REVIEWED STAR RATING:
***.5 (3.5/5)
November 2nd, 2009 at 7:26 am (#)
(This was a review made by students in a technology class who used Sumo-paint for a unit in Photoshop.)
Sumo Paint – an online image editor to create/adapt images to the users’ own liking.
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Photo Editing Features:
-You can select Parts of the photo can be selected and shapes, text, and layers can be added to enhance the overall look.
-Good to use for watercolor and painting on the computer, the paintbrushes look like actual paintbrush strokes.
-Cropping images and resizing pictures was convenient and touching up the lighting effects as well as hues/shades looked great! Adding these cropped images and merging them was easy.
-There are histograms showing color-balance levels and allows visual users to edit images without fussing around with complicated numbers or values. All they need to use is move the sliders up or down.
-Text boxes placed on images are difficult to move around and flexibility isn’t exactly this program’s MAIN feature when concerned with movement.
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Interface:
-The tools are displayed in an organized manner and are easy to find and understand.
-The way this software is displayed and put out looks just like photo shop (somewhat)
-Overall, Sumo Paint is like a mini-version of Adobe Photo shop with speed being a negligible problem and storage space being minimum since it is ONLINE. While Photo shop takes up a lot of space on the computer due to it being a desktop interface, Sumo Paint is trouble-free.
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Ease of Use:
-Objects and frames can be easily moved…but sometimes parts of the images are randomly cropped, ruining the image instantly.
-The select tool is hard to use.
-You cannot copy and paste pictures or texts.
-After inserting text, a user cannot edit or move the text around after you deselect the frame.
-A user cannot move a picture out of the frame while dragging it. If they do, it will cut the portion of the picture that went beyond the page’s frame.
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Import/Export:
-It is easy for them to get imported/exported into images BUT there is a limited variety of file formats with there being only .jpg or .png…for those users who DO have accounts( you can get an account for free), they have the option to DIRECTLY export to the account. However, the file location doesn’t show up and users have to hunt around their desktop.
-When pictures are inserted, they get cut automatically according to the page’s frame size and you cannot edit them.
-When you import pictures they become pixilated very easily when adjusting to the wanted image size and do not fit well.
-You cannot control what parts of the image are cut off or adjusted, and you cannot return the image to its original format afterwards.
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Additional features that you may want?:
-More color options; as users you are only given a certain selection of font colors so the appearance of the image/text is limited.
They should not limit all the programs to the pro-version.
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OVERALL RATING ( *****):
***.5 (3.5/5)