need PS painting effect tutorial

[laurenm]

Hi guys, I did a quick search and have also found one (which didn't come out so

good) on the net.

 

I wonder if anyone can give me a quick and easy (beginner level) technique for

making photo look like painting. This is a last minute idea for a slideshow I am

working on that has to be burned tonight. I had found a tutorial before that was

great, but can't find it now :(

 

Thanks for any help!

 

This is the picture (I have other choices if this one isn't good (it wasn't

taken by me)

[laurenm]

what did i do? sorry Mary!<div></div>

[bennyboy]

There's a watercolour filter built into PS...

[jayme]

Lauren- I have found there is no really easy way of changing an image to a painting. I would check out the Adobe site. There a multiple actions you can download for free put up by others. One may work for you. Adobe is not the only site, there are lots of sites with free action filters & sites that charge.

 

I couldn't resist playing with you image. Because it's so small, it was difficult. But here's an action filter, with some tweaking of my own. Not great, but on a larger image, I think it would work well. Good luck.

[chris_s___hampton_roads_va]

in the filter gallery, you can get a good start by combining different settings of texturizer, bry brush, paint daubs, and water color. It comes down to individual taste & intentions, as there are SO many possibilities.... are you using CS2?

[steve_swinehart]

The only program that gives true painting effects is Corel Painter IX.5. If you think you want to make photos look like paintings, that's the program to use. You work on a clone layer with whatever type of painting effect (watercolor, impasto, oils, charcoal, etc.) you want and it clones the color from the original photo onto the new layer with the painting effect chosen.

 

Anything you try to do in PS pales in comparison to what is available in Painter.

[laurenm]

cool Jayme. Well, I ended up finding those settings last night and played a tiny bit. Pretty lame results, but I needed to burn my slide show last night (3am) so had to do something.

 

Thanks for the tips, something I will certainly practice for future use (or plan ahead and leave more time to play).<div></div>

[geoff_foale]

Hello Lauren. Like you, I've looked at creating my own digital paintings. Chiefly to do something with photos that have a good subject but have been spoilt by user error! The automatic artist effects which I've tried haven't produced the results which I require. From my limited experiments I have found that you need to select and apply different settings to seperate parts of the original photo. Apply posterization to see which areas are which.

 

With your photo I have tried a very quick gentle watercolour effect. The method I used is:- 1, increase brightness slightly. 2, add slight Gaussian Blur (I used no. 1 but you can go upto 5). 3, posterize the image (to suit). 4, increase saturation and, if required, lightness. 5, enhance/sharpen edges. 6, add a little blur to taste. It does sound like a cake recipe doesn't it.

 

This winter, when I have more time, I will experiment again but would welcome advice from anyone who is more advanced in this technique.

 

Geoff.<div></div>

[bill_fouche]

There are lots of styles of watercolor, lots of photoshop strategies to approximate it. The following image was created by doing the following things in this order: color balancing the photo, increasing contrast in the subjects, using the dust/noise- removal filter to smooth out speckles and decrease detail. Then use an old third-party "impressionist" filter made by Microsoft (believe it or not).<div></div>

[jayme]

Lauren- I recently had a photo I took of my husband & 2 of our 4 grandsons printed on canvas. It was huge, like 36 x 28 (something like that) After getting the print, I took it to my framer. She had sent it out to be changed to canvas, then she applied a special type of clear finish. It was not the tacky looking swirl look. I don't like that. It actually turned out looking like a real oil painting. It has kind of a crackled, old varnish look. She did a super job. It takes careful, up close examination, to see that it is not a painting :)

 

I did nothing but take the image & crop it to my liking & decide how large I wanted it.