How it Works

This ain't your mama's image filter!

Provide a photo.

Pick a shape.

Watch Primitive make art.

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!

Features Explained

Controls at your fingertips.

Image: Choose the input image that you want the program to draw using primitive shapes.

Shape type: Choose the type of shape that the program should use to draw your image. Most of these are filled shapes, but the beziers are stroked. Combo mode allows the program to pick the best shape at each iteration.

Shape alpha: Constrain the program to use a particular alpha value for each shape, or uncheck the box to let the program optimize the alpha value for each shape individually.

Stroke width: Set the stroke width to be used for quadratic bezier curves. Uncheck the box to let the program optimize the stroke width for each curve.

Shapes per iteration: Generate multiple shapes during each iteration with a more localized search. This is most useful for bezier curves to get good image coverage more quickly.

Background color: Set the background color upon which the shapes will be drawn. Uncheck the box to use the average color of the input image as the background.

Working size: Choose between speed and quality. This option scales the input image to a certain size before running the algorithm on it.

Run until stopped: Choose this mode to run indefinitely, until the image appearance is to your liking.

Run until shapes: Choose this mode to stop running after a certain number of shapes have been generated.

Run until score: Choose this mode to stop running once the drawn image has a certain amount of similarity to the original input image.

Run in drawing mode: Choose this mode to paint shapes using the mouse cursor. Just click and drag and Primitive will add shapes in the general area of the mouse cursor. This makes the Primitive experience more interactive and user-driven.

Clear drawing: Clear the drawing to start over with new options.

Revert to defaults: Reset all of the options except for image and shape type back to their original settings.

100 shapes

300 shapes

900 shapes

Drawing Mode

Paint shapes using the mouse.

Primitive becomes more interactive and user-driven in drawing mode. Click and drag the mouse to paint shapes in areas of interest. The app will look for shapes to draw in the general area of the mouse instead of searching the entire image. Watch the video to see drawing mode in action!

Formats

Primitive can save its drawing in PNG, JPEG, or SVG formats. You can also set an output resolution to scale it up or down. SVG output consists of a single <rect> element for the background and <path> elements for each shape.

Tips

Press and hold the space bar to view the original image.

You can change most of the settings in the middle of a drawing. One interesting use of this is to draw some filled-in shapes first and then draw bezier curves on top to fill in the details.

Try hiding the toolbar and entering full screen mode to watch the program draw your photos!

Use the default working size of 256px to experiment and then bump it up to a large value when you're ready to produce a more detailed result.

Twitter

Follow @PrimitivePic on Twitter to see a new primitive picture every 30 minutes!

Support

Comments, questions, or concerns? Feature requests or bug reports? Contact: michael.fogleman@gmail.com

Primitive for macOS