Photoshop Creative

Many of you know about the Impressionist plug-in and have learned a lot about how to do things. There's quite a steep learning curve to it before you get what you really want - almost a whole new program to learn and I haven't got around to it yet.

I came across this tutorial for Photoshop that I've found can work quite well on PSE without too much trouble. It comes from a well-known contributor on there, and formerly of the PSE Group, called "Stevekin". I'll quote the original tutorial and put in my little workaround........

"Unfortunately, some of the artistic filters don't actually do what they say on the tin !
You need to use a combination. One method I have seen and used (and looks okay) is thus......

Open your image.
Copy it to the clipboard (memory) by going Select > Select all (Ctrl + A).
Ctrl+ C to copy to memory.
Deselect (Ctrl + D).

Now duplicate the background layer (Ctrl + J).
Set the foreground colour to a light grey (around 20-25%).
Keep the background colour white.

Go to Filter > Sketch > Chalk and Charcoal
Set the Charcoal Area to 6, the Chalk Area to 20 and the Stroke Pressure to 1.

Click on Filter > Brush Strokes > Spatter
Set Spray Radius to 10 and Smoothness to 5. Click OK

Change the blend mode of the top layer to Luminosity and flatten the file.

Here's where the copy of the original in memory comes into play !
Ctrl + V to paste the copy to its own layer and set the layer blend mode to Multiply.
Go to Image > Adjustments > Brightness / Contrast. Move the Brightness to 100%
and the Contrast to around 66%
Click OK.

Go to Filter > Artistic > Underpainting.
Keep the Brush Size at 6
Set the Texture Coverage to 20
Keep the Texture as Canvas and slide the Scaling to 100% and Relief to 4
In Light Direction choose Bottom Left.
Click OK.

(here's the PSE workaround)

Now Ctrl V and add that original clipboard image again, onto another new layer..... put it in the middle of the layer stack and set the Blend Mode to Overlay. Adjust Opacity as you like - it probably needs over 80%.

Flatten (if you like) and adjust the contrast to suit you."

Thanks for the tut, Geoff

hmmmm... I want to give this a try.

Here is my try:

And a 100% crop:

Michel,
I love your result & now I really have to try this one out.
Christell

This was a great tut Geoff. I had to redo it once because my resolution was too high and it didn't show up very well.

Yes, Suzanne, I tried it first on a pic I'd already re-sized for the web and it worked well but then tried it on a bigger image and the textures and effect got entirely lost in it. I dare say some fine tuning of the settings in those Filters - bigger contrast, strokes, relief etc. I'll see if I can come up with some differences.

First try...

http://www.prestophoto.com/photos/image/1028768/24460

[edit] This is/was 7" x 10" @ 72dpi [/edit]

Suzanne and Geoff,
I agree that the settings are not optimal for high res pics, that's why I had to post a small crop. The good thing is you can adapt the tut easily. I was particularly interested in the use of different standard filters with other blend modes. Common filters may have original looks with overlay or luminosity for example.
I think the choice of the starting image is important. Colorful and busy images can provide good results. I'll have to find suitable candidates.

Just tried out another modification to the process - I was looking at Noise Median for another purpose and wondered if it would help with the impressionist style.......... so I tried it as the third filter, after Brushstrokes > Spatter. Worked really well on my test. I'm wondering if it may have been better on its own layer but haven't tried that yet - I'd say it works best on that layer that has the chalk/charcoal and spattered colours, otherwise it may just make large areas of single colour and tone.

This was the first result....

http://www.prestophoto.com/photos/image/1029147/24460

{edit} This was 8" x 5" @ 72dpi [/edit]

This was a really interesting tutorial - thanks Geoff.



Michelle