Page #220 (179. Make a Photograph Look Like an Oil Painting)


180. Turn a Photograph into a Watercolor

Before You Start

73 Draw a Selection Freehand

77 Paint a Selection

82 Soften the Edge of a Selection

93 Create a Layer Filled with a Color, Gradient, or Pattern

146 Adjust Hue, Saturation, and Lightness Manually


The secret to enabling Photoshop Elements to generate a simulation of a watercolor from a photograph is to present it with a photograph that looks like a watercolor to begin with. A snapshot of the family hugging Donald Duck in front of Epcot Center simply isn't a candidate, nor particularly are any photos where people are the predominant subjects. Instead, you want still, wistful scenes whose latent patternsthe effects beneath the surfacecan be exploited by the paintbrush. The Editor's simulation of watercolor strokes is simply unconvincing for the everyday photograph, but can be striking when reprocessing an image that's prepared well ahead of time to receive the watercolor treatment.

Different watercolor techniques apply to differing styles of compositions. To make an image that convincingly looks like it was produced by a watercolor artist, your composition should look not only like watercolor paint was used to make it, but watercolor technique as well. The Asian watercolor technique is minimalist, and suits itself to very simple renderings such as a directly lit portrait against a neutral background, or in the case of the example used here, dark trees on very bright snow. This technique uses very few pigmentsgenerally black, terre verde (green), raw umber (brown), perhaps cobalt blue (although not in this example), and very few others. The key here is to make the image look like it was simply produced, carefully and quietly, in places by dragging a tapered-tip brush through a patch painted ahead of time with clear water.

See Also

179 Make a Photograph Look Like an Oil Painting

181 Make a Photograph Look Like It Was Drawn


1.

Create Composition and Paper Layers

To begin, open the image in the Editor in Standard Edit mode and save it in Photoshop (*.psd) format. With the Background layer selected in the Layers palette, select Layer, Duplicate Layer. Name the new layer Composition. This layer is where the basic alterations will be made.

NOTE

For true watercolor painting techniques, detail is reserved exclusively for the smallest possible areas of foreground matter, whereas the background is produced with iridescent washes. Rarely is every inch of the paper filled; often, the best watercolor compositions make good use of empty space to produce a pleasing, ethereal background.

Select the Background layer again. This time, select Layer, New Fill Layer, Solid Color. In the New Layer dialog box, type Paper as the layer's name. Click OK.

New layers, by default, are transparent. For this Paper layer to be useful, it must be fully opaquegenerally pure white, but perhaps a light pastel. Choose a paper color from the Color Picker that opens automatically and click OK.

2.

Remove Unwanted Elements

We need to remove any unwanted material that appears on the Composition layer, especially portions of things like halves of flowers or sides of barns. On the Layers palette, choose the Composition layer. From the Toolbox, click the Lasso tool. On the Options bar, set Feather to a reasonably high value, from 25 to 40 pixels for an image with 150 PPI, or higher if your image's resolution is higher. With your wrist loose and your elbow free in the air, make a sweeping loop around everything in your image that you want to include. When the loop is complete, choose Select, Inverse from the menu bar to invert the selection. Then press Delete to delete all the background elements, revealing the Paper layer beneath. The image should now have a fuzzy, white or pastel background.

3.

Blend Border into Paper

Cancel any active selections you have open: Choose Select, Deselect from the menu bar. In the Layers palette, choose the Composition layer. From the menu bar, select Enhance, Adjust Lighting, Levels. In the Levels dialog box, slide the white pointer to the left until you can no longer detect the feathered border you generated when you created the Composition layer. Click OK.

NOTE

The background elements for your composition should have large segments that are relatively free of detailif not a snowy hillside, perhaps a grassy knoll, a deep and calm ocean, or something as simple as a white wall. If your composition focuses on ground elements, your sky should be cloudless; if it focuses on the sky or has tremendous clouds, consider a serene and nondetailed desert for the ground elements. Whatever your background happens to be, you'll want to boost its levels to such a bright white that you no longer see the feathered border of the Composition layer.

4.

Smooth and De-texturize the Foreground

The texture of the foreground matter must be eliminated, removing the photographic look and leaving a smooth, polished appearance. Choose the Composition layer and select Filter, Noise, Dust & Scratches from the menu bar. In the dialog box, set Radius to 2a very low setting indeed, but you don't lose detail in the processand Threshold to 35. Here, we're trying to isolate areas to make them look as though they could have been produced with single brushstrokes. Click OK.

For this Asian technique, the brushstrokes are generally more representative of outlines or textures rather than areas. So you don't have to reduce the texture too much to make the existing lines look as though they can be produced with contiguous strokes. From the menu bar, select Filter, Blur, Smart Blur. In the dialog box, set Radius to 4.0, and set Threshold to 20.0. These settings generate edges that are crisp and smootha higher Threshold setting would generate fuzzy edges, and a smaller Radius setting would result in the loss of some of the image's character. From the Quality drop-down list, choose High; from the Mode drop-down list, choose Normal. Click OK.

TIP

If there's anything you have to "fudge" in the image, now's the time to do itbefore you apply the Watercolor filer. I used the Selection Brush tool (featured in 77 Paint a Selection) to specify small areas of the composition that I wanted gone, such as my neighbor's outdoor sauna peeking through one of the trees. I then used the Clone Stamp tool (featured in 162 Remove Unwanted Objects from an Image) to extend a far-off hill in the distance.

For this image of the trees, I discovered that the product of using these filters was a bit too dark. With the Composition layer chosen, I selected Enhance, Adjust Lighting, Levels and increased the layer's gamma to 1.25 by sliding the gray pointer to the left. Click OK.

5.

Apply Watercolor Filter

The highlight of converting an image into a simulated watercolor is…as you might imagine…applying the Watercolor filter. Here is where the magic really happens. From the Layers palette, choose the Composition layer. Then select Filter, Artistic, Watercolor.

For the Watercolor filter, the Brush Detail option should be set to a high value (from 12 to 14) to preserve the clean, smooth edges you've already created. The Shadow Intensity value should be left at 0 to avoid the addition of simulated black inks that aren't necessary for this technique. Set Texture to its maximum value of 3 to simulate the effects of watercolor paper. Click OK.

6.

Generate Outlines Layer

The icing on the cake, as it were, is the bordering effect. Bordering actually generates some of the pits where the powder in the pigment bunches up against the edges of the brushstroke, reinforcing the realism of the effect.

From the Layers palette, choose the Composition layer. From the menu bar, select Layer, Duplicate Layer, name the duplicate Outlines, and click OK.

Select Filter, Brush Strokes, Accented Edges. In the Accented Edges dialog box, set Edge Width to its minimum of 1. You want a very thin border line along the edges of some, not all, of your brushstrokes. Set Edge Brightness to 44 (medium light), and Smoothness to the medium setting of 8 to eliminate much of the clumping. Our goal is to borrow the paper color (white) to create faint, light distinguishing borders around the brushstroke areas. You can experiment with a medium dark Brightness setting of around 12, if you have a bolder composition; either way, you want some kind of border. Click OK; in the Layers palette, set the blend mode for the Outline layer to Screen, and Opacity to 50%. (For a dark border, set the blend mode to Darken instead.)

TIP

What truly impresses people, I've discovered, is giving them a greeting card or a message embellished with an attractive piece of artwork. After about 60 seconds, they realize the picture is of a part of their own garden, or their own house, or their own campus. It's the double-take that makes the difference. All of a sudden, it's not just a greeting card with a custom messageit's a piece of the recipient's own life that you're sharing with them, as you demonstrate that (from your perspective) their world is beautiful.

7.

View the Result

After you're satisfied with the result, make any other changes you want and save the PSD file. Resave the result in JPEG or TIFF format, leaving your PSD image with its layers intact so that you can return at a later time and make different adjustments if you want.



Adobe Photoshop Elements 3 in a Snap
Adobe Photoshop Elements 3 in a Snap
ISBN: 067232668X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 263

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