Landscape design software?

[Brian M]

Anyone know of a decent free or relatively cheap app or website for landscape design? I've tried a couple free ones but the plant selection is very limited.

I've been trying to get a landscape design but no one wants to do the design without doing the installation as well. All I really need is something to put plants over top of a picture. I have a good idea what I want, just want to be able to visualize it so I can lay it out and know how much of every to purchase.

[iDesign]

19 hours ago, Brian M said:

Anyone know of a decent free or relatively cheap app or website for landscape design? I've tried a couple free ones but the plant selection is very limited... I've been trying to get a landscape design but no one wants to do the design without doing the installation as well. 

The free "Gimp" alternative to Photoshop works well. And it's cross-compatible with Photoshop to a degree.

One workflow I've used before for a client that wanted to do his own tinkering was for me to create a design in Photoshop (with each object on its own "layer)... then my client downloaded the free Gimp software so he could then play around with the layers as desired. Moving & resizing objects in a file that's already "layered" is easy.

The hard part (regardless of the software used) is "masking" the plant(s). I haven't seen any sort of software on the market that includes a library of exotic palms, so you would have to do any masking yourself (i.e., download a photo of a plant from the internet, then paint a mask that removes the background). Pinnate palms are a pain to mask, but if you're just trying to get a general idea, you can set your masking brush edge to "fuzzy" and that will get you pretty close. You sometimes also have to use the rubber stamp tool to remove unwanted objects. 

The good news is that once you have a plant masked, you can reuse it in other designs. I spent a ton of time masking plants for my own yard designs, but now that I have a library of masked palms, I can drop them into other photos. I agree it would be ideal if there was a digital library that had lots of exotic palms preloaded.

If you send me a photo of your yard + internet photos of the plants you want to add, I would be happy to do a "quick & dirty" mockup for you as a one-time "freebie" (which you could then play around with in Gimp). But if you want it done well, make changes, etc. I'd need to charge hourly (for graphic design services, as I'm not officially trained in landscape design).

Happy to answer any Gimp/Masking questions if you'd like to try it yourself. It's super-fun, but has a bit of a learning curve... especially the masking part.

[Brian M]

@iDesign Sweet, Thanks! I'll give Gimp a try. I won't bother you with putting anything together, although I sincerely appreciate the offer.

One of two things will happen...I'll enjoy messing around and would have found a new hobby, or I'll get completely frustrated and just buy plants and throw them around until they look good.

If I end up putting together something halfway decent I'll post it

[D. Morrowii]

I used a google earth image of my property printed out and just drew on it. Its cheap but not very versatile. I was mostly interested in plan view since I was trying to figure out spacing and I planned to start out with small palms. For that even architectural plan symbols would be useful and easy to make or find.

Elevation view like @iDesign is doing would be fun to play with and to get a better visualization of the finished (as if you're ever finished) product. I find it much tougher to imagine my garden with all the different sized palms and plants at different heights etc. so I'd like to try it myself. I was looking around on the web and found a few pre-masked palm images if it helps. I don't have much experience with photo editing so I'm not positive these would be useful.

[iDesign]

I've actually thought about the possibility of uploading digital version of the palms I've masked, so other people planning out their yards could use them in their own yard designs. But I haven't because...

1) I don't own rights to the palm photos.
I assume most of us would have zero issues with fellow palm lovers using a masked version of their plant(s) in their own yard designs... they just don't want to see the images for sale in a stock photo website. But that's just me assuming... not sure what the law is on sharing masked plant photos.

2) There would need to be a place to upload the masked photos.
Palmpedia would be the ideal place to store masked versions of palm photos, as they would already be organized by scientific name (i.e., a palm lover would just upload their masked versions of a palm to the same Palmpedia page as the non-masked photos). That would require effort by whomever manages Palmpedia though... which is likely already a labor of love.

3) Most plant masking jobs are sloppy.
The above examples show excellent masking jobs. I could make mine that clean if it was a paid job, but I'm just using plant masking as a way to get a rough idea of what a palm would look like, so my own masking jobs aren't normally that clean.

In summary... If someone sees a plant in one of my yard mockups and wants to use it in their own yard design, shoot me a PM and I would be happy to send a masked version of the plant to you (which you can then bring into Gimp, Photoshop, or whatever you use for yard design fun). But if there was a way to share masked plants online (ideally as add-ons to existing Palmpedia pages), that would be ideal. Would be awesome for those of us that do Photoshop yard mockups... but that's a relatively small percentage of palm lovers :-/

[monkey33]

On 3/13/2022 at 10:50 PM, Brian M said:

Anyone know of a decent free or relatively cheap app or website for landscape design? I've tried a couple free ones but the plant selection is very limited.

I've been trying to get a landscape design but no one wants to do the design without doing the installation as well. All I really need is something to put plants over top of a picture. I have a good idea what I want, just want to be able to visualize it so I can lay it out and know how much of every to purchase.

Try using the Blender program, there you can not only change the proportions of plants, but also create new ones. Studying the program will take only a few days. In addition, the program is now free

[iDesign]

13 hours ago, monkey33 said:

Try using the Blender program...

Great suggestion! Though it really depends on the type of mockups being done...

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BLENDER (3D)

Fantastic for exploring space in a landscape. In this mockup for example, you could flip the landscape around to view at different angles.

Blender can also make photo-realistic renderings, though is it possible to use custom plants (like exotic palms) which wouldn't be included in their default library?

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PHOTOSHOP / GIMP (2D)

Strictly 2D, though that works fine for my personal needs. What I use it for is to do "quick & dirty" mockups of what a particular plant might look like in a particular spot. For example, someone on the forum asked what kinds of plants I might recommend for a space, and I slapped this together to help communicate. The Photoshop masking job on this one is really bad, but it serves the purpose of communicating a possible plant placement plan.

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With either program, the "dream scenario" would be to have a library of exotic palms to grab from (which have already been "masked"). Wish it existed!

* Disclaimer: Blender images above are random ones I found on the internet. Only the bottom image is mine (as an example of a "quick & dirty" Photoshop/Gimp mockup).