Lessons

Lesson Info

Turn a Photo into a Painting

Let's talk about some of the ways that we can start doing some things with painting, making our photograph look a little more painterly. I would still in this equation, so gonna consider things like some of those shapes and clipping mask things we talked about earlier. Is this kind of building on happening a show to you separately. But keep in mind, you can always, of course, pull these things together. So a few versions go a photo shop. We've always had our regular brush, which is just like the paintbrush, and the paintbrush works by saying, Pick anyone foreground color and I will paint with that color. Much is fine, but then this tool came along the mixer brush tool, and this one has a couple things about that makes it kind of interesting because the mixer brush to allows you to do various things, including Make it feel is, though I just actually painted this photograph and all the paint is wet, so I want to mix it around a little bit. Now I got to be up front and say there's a lot o...

f this that's really complicated, and there's so much settings that the best thing to do in this case is use some of the built in presets or tool presets, because these ones were someone else figured out. Here's a good combination to get this effect, because if you're like me and a lot of other people the first time he's the mixer brush, it just looks like you took your fingers and went and just made a big bush of painter like I'm not sure if that's exactly what I want. I also want to say my name is not Jack Davis. Jack Davis does a lot with painting. Into the hole was a two or three day class, I think, on painting here creativelive and it's eyewash little segment of a recently just to see. It was like, Wow, he takes it to a whole another level. So my intention not in any way to to try and come even close to what he's doing, but to just give you some ideas here. Some of the brushes in here are specifically designed for the mixer brush Any of these brushes? Let's go this way a little bigger as you can see it. Any of these brushes actually look like brush brushes as opposed just shapes. These are intended for a largely to use with the mixer brush because they act more like a regular brush. In fact, if you have a pressure sensitive tablet, there's actually why is it not? That's weird. I should be able to see that. Usually there's an option that shows up here. We can actually see a little icon of the brush. So if I tilt my brush like my pen, the brush icon changes to say, If you had a real brush and tilted it, that would change the way that that brush would apply. For some reason, this is great at a much your wife. That should show up right here. That's what you can kind of see. What's happening here is I'm moving my pen back and forth is actually changing the angle of how this brush is gonna work. So when we look at a particular brush, we can look and see what we're going to gather so they will preview so I can play around with things like bristle length and spacing and everything else that again change that the way this brush is going to interact, and I've got a blank layer, and I've got sample all layers turned on because what I want to have happen is whatever I do with this tool, I wanted to the results to be on that blank layer make it much a smaller version of this brush up here. As I start closer, I want to put it 100% wet paint. I want to make it really look like it's when that's probably not the best. Russians use this one, see if I can see anything any easier. Well, leisure to see there, to see how it's kind of pushing the paint as if it's the clouds are now wet white paint as going, pushing it in time to put this flow a little higher. Probably. Here we go. So it depends on where you start. If I push from the white and the blue, it goes that way. It can also push the other way. Now to turn this into a painting this way takes some effort, and I'm gonna in no means try and show you the whole concept, gonna show you an idea of how you might consider doing it. What I spent a bit of time looking to see what the people who do this, how do they do it? And the most common technique is to do it in a couple of steps where the first step, you make a layer and you do very broad strokes. So it almost looks like you wouldn't see any detail in the building You just see, like yellow and black, kind of pushed mushed together like this. You still see you kind of see something a little bit, Do that throughout the whole image. Some people call that under painting and then make another new layer where you take everything down or not. So the brushes much small than your painting detail, so you can kind of go over the top. But what I want to show you today is not as much. That is. It's a way that I can use the mixer brush. We don't have to learn, but all these things do if you want to, Good for you. But for me, I tried a few times and I just didn't took too much effort, and I didn't feel like I was getting a result that I want. I want to show you a couple of ideas of how I might use the mixer brush for a different kind of a technique. So here's my photograph. I'm gonna add a new layer below, and let's just fill it with white for now. Will change that after and on the top layer and then add a layer mask. But I'm gonna add the layer mask filled with black. When you do that, you hold down the option all key. That's a technique that allows you to say hi the entire layer completely. This would be exactly the same as me, adding a layer mask and hitting Invert it just does it in one step. Now, if I left it that way, that would be kind of pointless, because why would you want to have your layer completely hidden? So I'm gonna take my regular paintbrush using a paintbrush and white is my foreground color on the layer mask. And let's take brush like this, for example, and just do a couple of brushstrokes like this. This is just the regular brush. I've got it set toe 60% capacities. That means as I go over the same area now, see how it's starting to build up the paint little bit. So this is what my layer mass looks like right now. Now, by itself, that might be a pretty cool technique. This is made it look like the photo was kind of painted on a little bit. And that's you could do it just like that. In fact, that looks pretty cool. And if I went back and now adjusted the brush settings to say, change the spacing, make the bristles longer, it would have more of an effect. And I've done that kind of thing before had been quite happy with it. And I find it works for me best if I deliberately start with a lower opacity and kind of build it up on top each other to get that kind of layered look. But what makes this kind of particularly interesting to me is we go to the mixer brush tool now and have it set all this really heavy, wet paint kind of thing. I'm painting on the masks. I'm gonna show you first What looks like on the layer mask if I So what I'm doing is taking these existing colors just kind of mixing them around like this so you can see now, instead of getting just that solid color, I'm mixing the black into the gray and back and forth. We look at the context of the photograph. Now we're really changing the edges, so we get this kind of neat painted on effect. So this is not turning your photo into a painting. It's just making it look like there's some kind of painterly edge to it. But it's important to note at this point this has got nothing to do with the photo itself, because I'm not doing anything of the photo. I'm painting on the mask with the mixer brush. Now, if you want to make it look like you're photo is actually an oil painting, that's different, and that means doing some work painting, and there's not a little very quick way to do that. But this is a quick technique that I like because it uses our standard rules of I'm doing it on the mask and I get that effect and I can start saying, that's kind of cool. I like this part here, and I want to introduce a bit more black in their etcetera, knowing that all I'm really doing is saying use that toe. Haider show part of the the parts of the layer that I want. On top of that, I can, of course, still apply filters to this layer. I can also apply filters to the mask. So if I kind of like the way that's looking, But I want toe, take it a little step further, recognizing once again that when you apply a filter to a mask, you have less ability to edit. But it's still kind of interesting. So this is what my layer mask looks like. A the moment, all different shades of gray and white and black with things happening to it. So if I go to my filter gallery and texturizing now, I'm texturizing the mask because when I do that now, it adds that kind of canvas e effect to my photograph. Doing it this way means perhaps the most important part of it to me is my original photograph is completely untouched. So if I had any point, go, You know what? This is not working at all. If I hide the layer mask, I'm right back to square one. So I'm not doing anything where I'm like now that I've done these 27. I'm like, Oh, I've really ruined my photograph because all this is doing It's a way of making her photograph display in a certain way. We can also experiment with filters a little bit, so because it is already smart, let's go back to our filter gallery and use this one here. I want a little bit of this happening. I want to just very celebrating how this is already looking kind of painterly. That's pretty over the top. For me. It still looks kind of interesting from a painting perspective, but I would tend toe, probably lower the opacity of that filter. So now we're getting something. It's starting to have that look of, ah, oil paint he not all that detail that looks like a photograph. And really, that's just two things. This filter and that mask. So the filter. Sorry. The mixer brush can work directly on a photograph and say, I'm gonna start painting this and you could do that here. You could go in and still do some extra detail kind of work, but for me, I want to do it fairly quickly. That's a pretty cool start to me exactly. what I want, but it's because it's being done with filters. I can still go and say, What if I take this off and add another one on instead? Remember, you're going to see it here, see how this has got remembering I did texturizing before. The only one I put the eyeball beside is Paint Dobbs, which is one that I found did a pretty nice job of. That's why it wasn't really affected. That's what I was trying to click in the wrong place. There we go. That's more what I was trying to do something like that. So now you looks a little mawr like a painting, and if you want to bring out, I find if you go too quick with the starkness, that really kind of pulls too much into it. But and there's various settings you can use as well. But that's kind of the idea. We're going 100% C. So looks pretty interesting, and it's got the texture on the layer mask. I could also probably just do the text arise directly on here, is well and change it up a bit to make it look like a different kind of texture, so that's another option as well. So that concept of what I would call painting on a photo we can do that in a couple of different ways. In that case, we just started with something right from scratch. Let's go here. Let's use this one. Add a layer mask and then I'm gonna go on. Find all those things we scanned in earlier. Like maybe this one used that one and still thinking like a layer mask. I want mostly white and black like maybe somewhere in there, open and then copy this optional click on the layer mask and choose paste. It's way too big, so let's scale down Invert use levels to make a little more white black. So we're at that point, which is already looking not too bad to me. But once again, this is all that preparation. Just a very X. Instead of me taking a paint brush and painting something, I can also use one of my pre existing shapes and then switch to the mixer brush tool and start doing the same kind of idea of playing with the paint on the mask that was created automatically for me instead of me painting it and start toe play around with edges and middle parts and so on. Now, if you want to, there is the possibility where you can include the foreground color. So if you want, include a little bit of background in the mask. Now is we're painting or painting with some black in there as well. That's another option. This load amount lets you say I want to load mawr of the four round colorant along with the paint that you're mixing around that will change the behavior of how this tool actually works. How we could start, add some. And sometimes for me, it's just easier to get the regular brushed will put a bit of black and then start mixing the paint around. But if you think about it's all still the same recurring theme of the black, white and gray part of a layer mask and just were using the mixer brush to create more interesting combinations of black, white and gray. But it doesn't change the fact that still a mask so it still works the same way. So to create this kind of painted on look can provide some interesting options. I would a case like this continue experiments. Okay, so let's add a layer below and let's pick up one of these lighter colors to begin with. I'm not gonna keep it like that because that looks a little bit often. That's maybe a little bit too bright. Even. That's a little too much, but we'll stick with it for a second and then on above this layer, get back to my regular paintbrush here. Before, when I made those Smokey brushes, I wanted to be able to do something with them. So here's example of what I might actually use this for on a scale this down a bit and pick a darker version of that single, And I could probably pick it up from here is always gonna pick a color, though, and just that. Go on here a couple of times, maybe change the blend mode to multiply. So if we hide this for a second to see, I'm creating this kind of effect in the background. All it means is now. When I'm asked this, it's got something to see through to other than just a solid color, and he could, of course, change the shape and angle of these brushes to mix it up a little bit, and I use the same brush, make a new layer on top, switch it, Dwight, and make it even bigger. Use that same brush to kind of add missed into the photograph that wasn't actually there. Those are all different possibilities. The one thing I have to be careful in this particular brush can you see the very right hand edge. It's because that was the edge of the photo. There's a very straight line. So if I painted that, you would actually see that. So I want to make sure that I'm keeping that within the boundaries of whatever I'm doing, just to make sure I don't make that as obvious. Okay, so I'm not 100% sold on this color here, but that's OK. I could still change it, Um, because we're talking about color. One suggestion for you when you're doing this kind of experimenting, and you want to put a color layer below to be kind of your call a background color. In this case, I just chose a color and then said Phil, but frankly, there's probably an easier way that I should have done so should do now, which is to add an adjustment layer called solid color. They're not gonna for now, just pick any color and then drag it to the bottom. And the reason for doing that is otherwise if you sample a color, you have to go pick the color fill picked the color fill. This is much more of a live effect, because if I click on it now, I can get into the area I want. And every time I click on something I'm seeing very quickly, the result of this to say is that the color I want? I want to hear whatever it ISS, So putting a solid color at the bottom is okay. But this is actually now that I think about it, probably a better thing to show you, because it's much more of a live effect. So on the fly, you can see what happens if I go a different direction, whatever it might be, most of which I'm still not thrilled about. But that's part of why we're experimenting. Okay, questions so far on that part. No, I think everyone's good right now in the chat room, people falling along, they love the idea of the art. It's working well, I think for one in the chat about you guys, anything from you ever thought of something like this in your work? Uh, I thought about it but never knew how to do it. I try, but what not being that weight in a different way. But I laugh because it's easier than I did. Yeah, well, I think the key point to me is easier in the sense of easier to experiment because a lot of people go down a path and like that looks pretty good. They do five more things also there. Like, oh, now I'm in trouble because I kind of painted myself in the corner here. Even the layers that I painted directly At worst, I could just delete those layers start again, but least all the main things, like particularly the photo itself with that mask, it is just a mass looking always okay, that didn't work at all. Let's just turn that off. Try something different. So that's kind of my main point in showing you these repeated different variations to show there's all these different options that all start from similar concept. So Let's pause for a second and think about even though, at this point, many who are you thinking, Oh my gosh, we've seen so many different things we have but think about things that keep recurring. Layer mask, clipping, mask, smart object, smart filter. A lot of them are just variations on those themes, using in different ways, but often it comes back to If you're faced with wonder what the best way to do this think flexibility. And that usually means one of those things usually start off by smart filters and layer mass and adjustment layers.