I am on a quest for my boss. I need to find a good plug in (brush or filter) that can make a photo look like a painting. If any of you know of or have experience with a good one please let me know.
It can be freeware or it can cost a bunch, either way as long as it works good.
Give your photos a professional finish with sharpening in Photoshop. Learn to enhance details, create contrast, and prepare your images for print, web, and social media.
Make a clone of your image, select all and delete and start painting with an oil brush cloner. Within minutes you’ll have a painterly version of the photo.
the base version of Painter, Essentials will do the job for 99 bucks.
there’s a lot of stuff you can do just using layers and blending modes. There’s a book called something like Photoshop Blending Modes Cookbook, which you could stop by a Borders and take a look at to pick up some ideas. Painter is great, but there is a steep learning curve and using it can eat up a lot of time. You might also want to check out some of the sites that give you links to free Photoshop Actions. I’ve found a few that are quite good and easily altered to meet your own particular needs.
No learning curve for what I’ve just described David.
There’s a truck load of things to learn in Painter for sure, but that simple procedure will get you a finished job in 20 minutes max for the fist one and quicker each consecutive time.
Even better…Open your image in Painter, go to File>Quick Clone and Painter will do the deleting and create the tracing paper for you (Painter 8-9 only)
Go to Chalks and choose Variable Chalk
Set your paint brush to the rubber stamp icon in the Color palette…this way any brush becomes a cloner brush.
Go to the paper selector and choose a paper (french watercolor is one I like) Lower the grain of the brush in the control bar (the lower the grain the more the paper texture applies…(painter quirk).
Start big and sloppy (blocking) then keep reducing the size of the brush..(bracket keys same as PS) follow the contours of the image as you reduce the size of the brush and you will have a terrific organic feel.
If you still have the Wacom install CD, there are several tutes from Lynda Weinman plus if you register the app you could get about 10 more. Among them you’ll be up and running in no time.
steve a lot have told me corel painter is a good choice for this so I will look into that right now.
as far as using photshops built in effects and artistic filters, we have, and they are not enough of what we need. actually my boss saw what a friend of his was doing with corel painter and said that is what i need. i was trying to locate somthing that can plug in to Photoshop CS versus a stand alone program, but my boss can do what he needs to do and import it into CS.
Be very careful there…some layer styles will NOT translate to Painter and Painter effects can disappear on import to Photoshop…best bet..
From Photoshop to Painter 1. Create Layered Photoshop document>Save Layered document. 2. Create Duplicate of PS document>Flatten>Save Flattened as a .psd Open in Painter
From Painter to Photoshop 1. Create Layered Painter Document>Save Layered Painter document as a .riff (Especially if you have used Mosaic,Dynamic Plugin Layers, etc.) 2. Clone Document>Drop Layers>Save Cloned document as a .tiff Open in Photoshop.
