John Prescott wrote:
Using Photoshop 7, is there a method or tool of converting a photographic image into an image that rersembles a water colour or an oil painting?
If you google on "painting photoshop" you’ll see many links for this, most are actions using various filters. To my eye none of these look very convincing.
You can also use Photoshop brush tools with the Art History brush to mimic some painting styles … I think it looks a lot better with a tablet than with the mouse though, the brushstrokes don’t look convincing with a mouse. I’ve seen some images using this technique that looked OK.
I’ve tried a couple of stand-alone programs to do this, like Xaos Paint Alchemy and Deep Paint and sometimes (some images) they look OK, some times they look too "machine-generated". I wasn’t overly impressed with these either.
If you REALLY want to do this at a high level I think you need a program like Corel Painter (latest version) and a Wacom tablet and a book on painting with Painter like say "Painter Creativity" by Jeremy Sutton. But now you’re talking a few hundred bucks … in most ways Photoshop and Adobe are far superior to the Corel graphics products, but Painter (which has some warts, like weak color management) does a much better job with the brushes and the ability to mimic different paint mediums, I feel.
Bill