Turning a Photo into a Painting by Jack Davis & Linnea Dayton WITH VERSION 7, PHOTOSHOP CAN FINALLY PAINT! Using the new capacities built into Photoshop s Brush engine and the settings you can save as Tool Presets, you can get spectacularly realistic simulations of watercolor, oils, pastels, and other media, either by working from scratch with the Brush tool or by cloning a photo as a painting with the Art History Brush or the Pattern Stamp yes, that s right, the Pattern Stamp, with the Impressionist option turned on. If turning a favorite photo into a believable painting sounds like fun, you re in for a treat! Of the two cloning tools, the Pattern Stamp gives you more control than the Art History Brush. With the Pattern Stamp you paint stroke-by-stroke, pulling color, but not detail, from the source image. To create a painting like the watercolor above, you can download our source photo, along with a custom Wow Pattern Stamp Tool Preset as well as a custom Action and Style for enhancing the painting you ll find all these files at www.peachpit.com/wow. Follow the directions in the ReadMe file to install the custom Presets in the appropriate folders within Photoshop 7 s Presets folder. Then follow the directions below. PREPARING THE PHOTO. First choose the photo you want to turn into a painting you can use the Davis-Yokohama Hut.jpg file you ve downloaded or use a photo of your own. We ve already prepared our file (the original before version is shown here on the left, and the prepared downloadable file is shown on the right). Adapted from Adobe Photoshop 7 One-Click Wow! (Adobe Press / Peachpit Press)
But if you re starting with a photo of your own, here are some changes you might want to make: Exaggerate the color and contrast until you have the colors you want. Remember, this is supposed to look like a painting, not a photograph be expressive! If you want your painting to have an unfinished edges look (like what we ve done here), make a selection of the edges and fill it with white. LOADING PAINT INTO THE BRUSH. To make the image the source for painting with the Pattern Stamp, define the entire image as a Pattern by choosing Edit > Define Pattern. In the Pattern Name dialog box, type in a name and click OK. Now set up this new Pattern as the cloning source for the painting: Choose the Pattern Stamp from the Tools palette (it shares a space with the Clone Stamp). In the Pattern Stamp s Options bar, click the little arrow to the right of the Pattern swatch to open the palette of samples so you can choose the Pattern you just defined. MAKING A CANVAS (OR PAINTING SURFACE) LAYER. This step will add a surface layer above your image to make a foundation for your painting and to serve as a visual barrier between the photo and the painting layer, so you ll be able to see your brush strokes clearly as your painting develops. One way to do this is to click the Create new fill or adjustment layer button at the bottom of the Layers palette, then choose Solid Color and click on white in the Color Picker. When the new layer appears in the Layers palette, reduce its Opacity so you can see the photo through it.
PREPARING A PAINT LAYER AND PAINTING. Click the Create a new layer button at the bottom of the Layers palette to add a transparent layer for painting. Then, with the Pattern Stamp still chosen, in the Tool Presets palette (opened by choosing Window > Tool Presets), choose Wow-Sample PS Tool ( PS stands for Pattern Stamp ) from the list that pops out at the top of the palette. Then click in the palette to choose the Wow-PS Watercolor-Medium tool. VARYING THE BRUSH SIZE For painting in Photoshop 7, using a Wacom pressure-sensitive tablet and stylus definitely gives you a better feel and more options for controlling a brush than using a mouse. But even if you currently have only a mouse, you can vary the size of the brush tip by keeping your fingers on the keyboard s bracket keys and toggling the brush size up and down. Tapping the [ key makes a brush tip smaller; tapping ] enlarges the brush tip. Now keep these pointers in mind as you paint: In general, start with a larger brush tip and then use smaller ones as you add finer details (see the sidebar, Varying the Brush Size, at the left). Don t scrub over the image, but instead make brush strokes that follow the color and shape contours. Just as in a real watercolor, don t let colors touch, or the details will blur. To imitate a single-color watercolor wash, use one continuous stroke over an area rather than starting and stopping. From time to time, increase the Opacity of the Solid Color layer to hide the original image completely so you can see how the painting is developing. (Here the painting-in-progress is shown with the Solid Color layer s Opacity set at 75% on the left and at 100% on the right.)
ENHANCING THE PAINTING. When the painting is complete, you may want to try one of these techniques to further enhance the art media effect: Increase the density of the color by making a copy of the paint layer (target the paint layer by clicking its name in the Layers palette, and then press Ctrl-J on Windows or Cmd-J on the Mac to duplicate it). This extra layer will build up any strokes that are partially transparent, to intensify the color, so it s especially effective for watercolor paintings. You can adjust the Opacity of this top layer to taste, and then merge the two paint layers together (with the top paint layer active, press Ctrl/Cmd-E to merge the two layers). Target the paint layer in the Layers palette and open the Actions palette (Window > Actions). Then choose Wow-Sample Enhance.atn from the palette s pop-out list, click on the Wow- Paint Edge Enhance Subtle Action, and click the Play button at the bottom of the palette. This Action works by making a copy of the paint layer, then filtering the new layer using Filter > Sketch > Photocopy with the Foreground and Background colors set to black and white, and finally changing the Blend Mode to Color Burn to combine the filtered copy with the layers below. The Action darkens the edges between contrasting areas and makes it look like the watercolor pigments are actually pooling along the edges of the painted strokes.
You can make the paper texture that s built into the brush more apparent by applying the Wow-Texture 01 Style to the paint layer. This Style uses the same tiling pattern that s included in the custom Wow-PS Watercolor-Medium Preset. To apply the Style, target the paint layer in the Layers palette, choose Wow Sample Texture Style from the Styles palette s pop-out menu, and click on the Wow-Texture 01* Style in the palette. And there you have it! For 800 other custom presets check out the new book/cd Adobe Photoshop 7 One-Click Wow! from Adobe Press.