Papercut Art
Layered paper pictures with real depth: a stack of paper layers, and everything on them stays an object you can pick, drag and change.
Papercut Art (overview & stage) Extension 4 items #
Layered paper pictures with real depth: a stack of paper layers, and everything on them stays an object you can pick, drag and change.
A picture is a stack of paper layers. Everything you place on one - a deer, a forest, a moon, a cloud, a horizon, your own words - stays an OBJECT: click it in the picture to pick it, drag it anywhere, turn it, resize it by its corner handles, roll a new variation, send it to the layer behind or in front, or delete it. The arrow keys nudge the selection, Delete removes it, and Ctrl+Z leads back.
Nothing is baked into the paper and nothing is tied to a horizon. An object may sit anywhere, several may share a layer, and any of them can be punched OUT of its layer as a hole instead of added to it.
Presets
#Sixteen ready scenes (Misty Alps, Deer Woods, Night Wolf, Open Water, Whale Song, City Sunset, Heart Meadow, Eagle Heights, Bear Woods, Cat & Rooftops, Wordscape, Desert Oasis, Quiet Lake, Fox in the Field, Owl Hour, Horses at Dusk). A scene replaces the sheet stack, look and frame - your photo source and cut settings stay.
Looks
#Eight color moods from the all-white Lightbox over Sunset, Forest and Night Glow to Noir & Gold. A look is a starting point on the three paper dials below; turning one simply leaves the preset behind.
Glow & paper grain
#Glow strengthens the warm light behind the back sheet - the lightbox effect. Paper grain adds a subtle paper texture to every sheet.
Light & shadows
#One light drives every shadow: its horizontal position (drag the sun or use the slider), the shadow strength and the softness. The shadows between the sheets are what makes the stack read as real depth.
Layers & objects Extension 9 items #
A layer is an empty transparency, objects are the things on it - and objects keep their identity for as long as the picture exists.
The right panel lists the stack front to back: every layer with its objects nested underneath. Click a row to select it, use the arrows to change the depth order, and the two small arrows on an object move it to the layer behind or in front.
A layer has no shape of its own. A backdrop, a horizon, a frame edge - each of those is an OBJECT you place on a layer, which is why two ridges can share one layer and why a horizon can be picked up and dragged like everything else.
The stack
#Layers front to back, each with its objects nested underneath. Reorder layers with the arrows, recolor them with the swatch, remove them with the x. Each layer also has its own shadow strength.
Objects
#Anything placed on a sheet: animals, tree groups, plant patches, clouds, sun and moon, flocks, single flyers, corner branches and words. Click one in the picture to select it, drag to move it, hold Alt while dragging to turn it (or use the rotation slider), and set its size, kind and variation in the Selection card. Standing objects follow the horizon of their sheet and pivot on their feet when turned, so they never float and never sink; free objects go wherever you drag them.
Bands
#Landscape objects with a profile edge: alpine ridge, rolling hills, dunes, scalloped water, a city skyline with setbacks and spires, or a plain flat ground. Horizon, height and ruggedness are dials on the object, and the seed rerolls its shape.
Trees & ground cover
#Procedural plants that reroll with the seed: conifers with drooping tiers, broadleaf trees with a lobed crown, slender birches, palms with arcing fronds, shrubs, grass tufts, reeds, meadow flowers and boulders. Count, spread and height variation are yours - at no variation the trees line up like an orchard, at full variation they range like a wild stand.
Animals
#Twenty-three animal silhouettes traced from public-domain originals, each one an object you place and drag. Ground dwellers (deer, moose, fox, hare, bear, wolf, cat, dog, owl, horse, squirrel, boar, ibex, robin, gull) stand on their sheet's horizon; whale and dolphin belong in the water; eagle, heron, gulls, songbirds, owl and butterfly fly in the sky, cut out of the backdrop.
Cloud sky
#Clouds with real cumulus lobes, and two dials of their own: billow piles them up into a towering cumulus or keeps them a flat bank, fray breaks the outline into separate tufts. A sun, a full moon, a crescent or a flock can be paper on one layer or a hole punched in the next.
Text sheets
#Your words as paper. Letters keep their real counters - the hole in an a, d or o is simply a hole, with nothing bridging it. Switch an object to "punch out of the paper" and the words become windows in the layer instead.
Frames
#The frontmost layer can be a frame: circle, heart, arch, oval, hexagon or an initial letter, with an adjustable inset.
Corner branches
#A branch grows in from a corner with twigs and leaves - the classic framing device of layered papercut art. Pick one or two corners, its reach and leaf size; it stays attached to its corner, so the sheet is one piece by design.
Photo depth Extension 3 items #
A picture becomes paper layers along its real DEPTH - and the local subject cutout lifts a person onto the front layer.
Pick a source (the document, a layer, the media library or an upload) and the picture is sliced into up to twenty layers. The editor runs its own depth model on your device to do it, so what ends up in front really was in front. Where that model is not installed, the picture is sliced by brightness instead and the status line says so - nothing has to be installed for the studio to work.
Depth sheets & histogram
#The layer count sets how many sheets the photo becomes, from two up to twenty. Slicing by depth needs no thresholds; when the picture is sliced by brightness instead, the band borders start at fair quantiles and each one is a draggable handle on the live histogram.
Smoothing & invert
#Smoothing calms the brightness map before slicing, so the layer edges flow instead of crumbling. "Bright side front" flips the reading for pictures where the near things are the pale ones. Both apply to the brightness path.
Subject sheet
#With one switch the picture's subject is cut out ON YOUR DEVICE (the same local model the free tools use - nothing is uploaded) and becomes the frontmost layer of the stack.
The paper & the insert Extension 4 items #
What the paper looks like runs on three dials rather than a list of names.
Color comes either from the look's tonal ramp or straight FROM YOUR PHOTO, where each layer takes the average color of its own depth band. The paper surface is smooth or fibrous. And the layers are separated either by a deep, soft shadow - the lightbox - or by a narrow hard rim, which reads as a poster.
Color from
#The look's palette, or the photo itself. With "the photo", every layer takes the average color of the band it adds, so the stack looks like the picture it came from instead of a tonal ramp.
Surface & separation
#Smooth paper or a visible fibre; a deep soft shadow between the layers or a narrow hard rim. Together with the color source these three dials span the whole range from a white lightbox to a flat poster.
Detail
#How closely the paper edges follow fine wiggles. Lower detail gives calmer, more confident curves; higher keeps more of the original shape.
Insert as layers
#Insert places the picture as a group with ONE editable editor layer per sheet of paper, stamped so Edit Papercut Art reopens the studio with everything intact.