Skip to main content

Transforming a Photograph into a Painting

Lesson 7 from: Adobe Photoshop: Creative Explorations, Lighting Effects & More

Ben Willmore

Transforming a Photograph into a Painting

Lesson 7 from: Adobe Photoshop: Creative Explorations, Lighting Effects & More

Ben Willmore

buy this class

$00

$00
Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2200+ more >

Lesson Info

7. Transforming a Photograph into a Painting

Next Lesson: Oil Paint Filter

Lesson Info

Transforming a Photograph into a Painting

I would like to talk about taking a picture and making it look a bit more like a painting, and there are some people that like to do that manually where they are literally painted every stroke in and there are other people that we would rather hit a button and have photoshopped do most the work. S o we're going to start off with mohr of the latter, where you have photoshopped do most of the work, then we will progress a little bit more into the former, where you have to paint it in yourself. Tomorrow is the main time we're going to be talking, though, about actually using the painting tools in all the features that are associated with it. So let's, take a look. Here is a photograph that I took what two weeks ago this is in the pollution, the area of washington I've been exploring recently, and they'll be areas of, I believe it's called canola that's in bloom, and we had karen here that's my wife doing a yoga post, so I wanted to add a little bit of a painterly feeling to this not exact...

ly like it looks like it's truly painted, but just give it a feeling that's a little different than what we're getting here just zoom up and see what we have for now and let's see what we can do it first off I want to do it in a way where I could easily make changes later let's say I want to do different adjustments or retouching to this and not be stuck with the paint really look to do that I'm going to first go to the filter menu and say convert for smart filters and just so you know, any time you ever choose that it's just a short cut for this menu command it does the exact same thing is that that's what you're really choosing? And they just found that not enough people knew that you could choose that before applying a filter to make it so the filter is not permanent instead the filter is just a necessity to the layer where it's just sitting there something you could throw away or turn on and off and because not enough people were using it I think they slid it over here with a slightly different name but that's all the dusters and into a smart object saying we're going to choose that in my layers panel the only indication that I've done that is a little icon on top of the thumbnail for my image this icon here whenever you see that that means it's a smart object and with a smart object it's going to protect the original contents of this layer so the filter that I apply will not be able to directly affect the image instead it'll be just kind of attached to that layer and let's see what we can end up doing. I'm going to go up to the filter menu and we'll try to going into the filter gallery and in here we have all sorts of filters I'm just going to use one right now and it's called rough pastels looks kind of cool with whatever it defaulted to glass looks funky down that like she's behind a big sheet of textured glass, but I don't want that look, I want rough pastels you could see with the rough pastels you do get a kind of ah diagonal paint stroke kind of feeling to it and all we need to do is find two in the settings that air here and so let's look at what we might want to apply, so in my case I'm going tio come in here and I think breath pastels at thirty five should be all right. I think the main thing I might end up shifting around and here it's just kind of fine tuning this because I'm going to actually use more than one setting because I like the way this is looking in the background out here it's looking very painterly I don't mind the way it's looking where hands are in things, but I think where her faces and another area is just way too much so we're going to actually end up doing two different applications of this particular filter and for the first application I think settings around here is a alright starting point what's nice is that if I end up um I was going to say uh changing my mind since this is on a smart filter I can always go back and I can modify the settings it's not permanent but actually I think what's happening in here at the moment is if you look on the right side the lower right you can see a list of effects that are being applied to remember the last time we used this filter I think we were creating a texture we had done something like the clouds filter and then we came in here we apply toe a siri's and it looks to me like it's remembering the last two which is making this more extreme than usual if I turn off the eyeball for the other two I think we're going to get much mellower result and it might be actually little more applicable to this image let's take a look yeah so that was actually under painting let's just build him up under painting watercolor and then rough past else which was getting rid of quite a bit of detail and if I turn off these other two that's just it remembering it from when we created a texture earlier so let's just do rough pastels that's muchmore mellow all right, I'm gonna click, okay? And whenever you apply a filter on a smart object, it ends up showing up here as a little line at the bottom. You could turn off the eyeball to hide it. Uh, turn on the eyeball to show it again. We're double click on its name to change its settings, but it also comes here with a mask and let's use that mask. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to select karen, I'll do that before the image has been distorted with the filter because otherwise this yellow is being pushed into her skin area, so I'm just going to turn off the eyeball on the filter gallery that's been applied, so we see what it looked like beforehand I'm going, then go over and use my quick selection tool, and when I use quick selection, you'll get a better looking and result. If you turn on a check box up here called auto enhance, you've never used quick selection before by chance. This is what it looks like, this little brush, a little dotted circle behind it, and the way it works is you want to choose a brush that is the largest brush that will allow you to paint across the majority of what you want to select without getting over spray in the background. That means I want to brush no bigger than the width of her wrist because otherwise, when I paint across the area where wrist is, I would end up getting over spray and the background so I might need it end up switching to us even smaller brush to get where her fingers are as well, but let's, try it out, I'll click here, I'll start to drag in. All I'm going to do is drive across wherever karin shows up oops, I accidentally bumped into the background I don't if you noticed it, but I went a little bit too low. I'll fix that in a moment you can let go and click again as many times as you want each time you click it's going to just add to the selection you had previously and s o this is one approach I can use to select karen, but I find that oftentimes thinking about what you don't want selected can sometimes be simpler because if you look at karen she's wearing gray and black and she has skin tone, she's got a lot of colors like at least three, maybe four. And let me show you a slightly different way of approaching this I'll just choose d select instead wanted just select the background because with the background I could use a pretty big brush and I could just do this that go over here select I just let go and clicked again to select this other area and go up here and get the top and get in here and then there's something where photoshopped could help me out because there's a lot of areas I don't currently have selected like looking between your fingers didn't get that and look down here see in this area there's some yellow up here close to her body. I don't want to get a brush small enough to paint over that without getting over spray so let's cheat it's photoshopped I love cheating saves time, so I have most the background selected. All I'm going to do is go to the select menu and I'm gonna tell foot or top to select things that are similar now there's two commands here that could be helpful, there's grow and they're similar differences gro is going to expand my selection to make it bigger and it's just going to make it bigger? Well, it goes across colors similar to what you already have selected, so if I choose grow, we get some of those areas near the bottom. The thing that grow can't do is find an isolated area, for instance let's say I did not have the area that issel d select it in here, I didn't have that part if I go over here and choose grow it's not able to go into this part it's got to be one continuous selection that's unbroken it can't leap over something to find maurin here choose undo the command called similar though looks across the entire picture and it can create isolated areas where their broken into multiple chunks so I think similar is going to be better here there it got into that area right in here just so you know both grow and similar use the tolerant setting of your magic wand tool so if you find it doesn't select enough you could increase the tolerance sitting on your magic wand and it would select or wider range of tones and you could decrease it if it's not slutty enough so anyway on I just chose undo for a moment I'm just going to make sure I got enough of this stuff selected that's easy to select get all the easy stuff before I end up using grow or similar part down there okay, I think I got all the easy stuff selected then I can choose either grow or similar in my case similar and that should get everything else and now if you look you see how it's nicely selected around these elements all right, so I got that selection now I'm going to go into my layers panel remember we had a filter applied to the layer and I just turned off the eyeball icon that was next to it I'll turn that eyeball back on, so you see the filter being applied once again again, and what I want to do is just make it so it doesn't affect karen. So zoom up here right now, you see the filter encroaching into her arm like that. I want to prevent that from happening right now we have all the yellow areas selected out here, I want the exact opposite of that, so I go to the select menu and choose in verse that'll give me the opposite, so that means now I have this area and here selected, I'll work on the mask so my layers panel I just clicked on the mask you can see the corners are highlighted to indicate that's what's being worked on in on a mask if you fill it with black anywhere, it removes whatever that mask is attached to that mask is attached to our filters, so if I say phil and I tell it to fill with black now the filter's not applying to karen d select so now we have it just on the background, but I think that that makes it look like a photo plopped onto a painterly background instead of looking like she belongs there, and so what I want to do is apply the filter again, I'm just going to apply it with a lower setting and I'm going to use on ly that lower setting where carrie's body is and that way it won't affect it quite as much now I could go to the filter menu and just apply the filter again the problem with that is this mask will affect all filters attached to that layer, so if I end up applying to wear three filters to it, that mask will affect them all I need to have a different mask for it so what I'm gonna do is duplicate this layer I'll just type command j to jump it to a new layer and then I'm gonna come in here in our mask is limiting where the filter can affect the image right now if you look at the mask, black hides the effect it's hiding it off of karen I'm going to choose a different setting, phil a filter that I want to apply just to karen so I'm going to invert this mask so we have the opposite of what's in it right now to do that I can either type command I control I am windows or come over here and there's the manual choice of invert you just need to make sure the mask is active, so if you see the corners highlighted on the mask that's what it should invert and now do you see there are mask is working on the opposite now I'm just going to double click in the name of the filter so I can modify its settings and use lower settings in that particular area. Let's, take a look now let's, get over here to where I can see better portion of karen where the edge of her hair is, where arms are that type of thing and let's see what I might need to do let's bring our stroke length down because that's what's causing it to encroach into her arm so far with the yellowish from the surroundings is being pushed in there so let's bring that stroke length down and down to get less and less of it back we can bring it all the way down that's perfectly fine, the stroke detail we might want a little bit less detail in it and by doing those two changes we're still getting texture where her faces but it's nowhere near as aggressive as what we had before. I could also take the relief, which is how kind of you aggressive the texture is how three dimensional the texture is and possibly bring that down a little bit. All right? I'm kind of liking that better for where her arm is we still got the really painterly look out here once we get to her arm, it encroaches a little bit but not all that aggressively, so I'm going to click okay so now let's, look at what we have on the bottom. We have this image which has the aggressive filter applied it's on just the background, not on karen. On top of that, we have this version, which is a lesser version of the filter with the mask, so that that filter on ly effects karen and not the background. But we have a problem, and that is on this version of it. We have the filter applying the mask is controlling where it applies and it's on ly applying to karen. But look at the background, the background looks like the original and so when I turn on the layer that's underneath there's no empty part of the top layer two to allow you to see through to what's underneath, it just doesn't matter if I turned layer on underneath or not so here's what I need to deal, I need to take a larry it's on top and I don't want a filter or I'm not sorry, not filter I don't want to mask the effect of the filter I want to mask the entire layer to make it to the layer doesn't show up at all out here to do that all add a layer mask, so I go to the bottom of my layers panel click in the layer mask icon. And then I'd really, really like to be able to drag this mask up here, and if it was a normal mask, it would let me do that let's see if it lets me do it here, it just won't darn it with normal layer mask, you can just drag between them, and it will move it up there and unfortunately won't let me do it here. So somehow we have to learn howto work around that to somehow transfer this mask over there. Here's how we can do it if we make that mask visible, then we'll be able to copy it. Then if we make the other mask visible, will be able to paste it inside to make a mask visible. You hold on the option key ultima windows, and you click on it there's a mask, so I'm just going to choose select all copy, then I'm gonna come up to the other mask, and if I just chose paste, it wouldn't work. It would create a brand new layer with the contents that I pasted in order to get it to go inside the mask. The mask must be visible, so I hold down the option key again, ultima windows and I click right on the mask now I can choose paste. The other mask I could fill with white uh or I don't think it's really going to matter if it's still there because we're hiding the area that's out here anyway via the lair mask so now let's see what we're getting if I hide the layer that's underneath the top layer has the filter applied to where karen is in the rest of the image simply disappears, allowing you to see down to the layer that's underneath, which has the more aggressive version of the filter applied. So now we have those two and I think that looks nice. The only thing is I don't like the way it looks where her eyes are on the way here lips are those kinds of areas I don't like the painterly effect, so I'm gonna work on the mask that controls where the filter is being applied this one, I'll grab my paintbrush tool in if I paint with black, I can remove the filter from any area that I paint on, so I'll come in here with a small brush and I'll say just get it off of her eyes. I don't want to get it off too many areas because then it'll start looking like those images you see where people blur soften a picture, but the eyes like are sticking out looking artificial because they don't look like they belong with the rest of the picture so I might do it with just the eyes, but the rest of the image, wherever I don't like the texture wherever it's a little too much I'm just going to work with lower opacity, so with my brush I'm going to bring the opacity may be down to fifty, so I get rid of half of the effect and I might come in then and say just give it a little bit off her ears I'm more or less telling toe lessen the effect, same with where her mouth is or nose in any other area where I might not like it, but that way the effect is still there issues at half strength I'll bring thee a passage back up to one hundred percent and I notice in the background surrounding here there are some areas like right here where it seems like it doesn't have the texture do you see where it looks kind of soft? Can you see that right there and in a few other areas just outside of her arms? It looks a little soft let's see if this top layer, which has lesser settings applied, would allow that to show through let's see gonna have to do a few things first, I'm gonna have to come over here and say I want to work on the mask of the filter paint with white to say aloud to come through but then I'm also gonna have to paint up here on the mask that's limiting where that layer shows up gotta paint on both but the filter that has the lesser settings seems to not produce that kind of blurry look in the background. I might look around here right here you see a little line of semi blurriness have to first paint on the mass the controls where the filter applies because it's black in that particular area then I have to paint on the mass that controls where that layers showing up their ego but that's optional. So the main thing you should learn here is that we can use it as a smart object and by doing so you condemned click on the name of the filter at any time and change the settings. So if you find it's to grass, if you can turn it down or turn it back up and if you work on a duplicate layer, you could apply a different amounts within that filter and mask the two so that the top layer contributes to this portion of the image and the bottom layer fills in the rest with a more aggressive application of the filter. This particular effect is relatively subtle, though, so you have to be up close two really good a good uh, feeling for it, but I think it could be nice let's try a different image here's another image from the police the same area I've been exploring in has a little bit more of aggressive of a painterly look and I'd like to show you how that was created in and doing so I'll show you a bunch of different ways it could be applied here I happened to have ah bunch of layers those layers aren't actually needed you only need one layer for this particular effect and let's just build it up and I'll show you the different ways you could apply it in the advantages of working in different uh different ways, so I'm going to act as if I've never done anything to this image so here's my original the only thing I've done to the original is I oversaturated it usually when I turn something into a painting, I find that people use a little more expressive colors in a painting, and so I have a tendency of over saturating my images before I turn it into a painting, so the saturation was boosted on this image but otherwise that's what we want to start with then before I apply a filter, I'll go to the filter menu and say convert for smart filters so any filters I happened to apply our are put on in a way where they're not permanent and where I have a mask I could paint onto control where they apply to the image and then I'll go to the filter menu, and I'm just going to go into the filter gallery filter gallery is a collection of filters we could apply so let's do it there and let's start off in here by applying the sponge filter here, sponge you see how it's kind of breaking up the image in a way where you don't see the fine details within the image, and so I'm just gonna go over here, and it looks like it remembered the last settings I use, so I don't really have to adjust it, but if you'd like to see what kind of variation you'd be able to get, if you went with a large size, you'll see it's gonna have less detail than tree branches. If you go for a smaller size, you're going to have more busy and and detail in there. We also have definition, which is also going to have quite a difference on what the edges of those branches look like, and I think I ended up around twelve, and then we have smoothness, which can smooth out the shape, getting more, uh, or make it more complex. Then I'm gonna just apply mohr filters to this one on top of the other, and remember, you can do that in the lower right if you'd like. Down here it's still remembers those two I applied earlier when I was making a texture if you want to get rid of those their eyeballs air turned off so they're not affecting the image I can click on him hit the trash can to get rid of those we're just going to build up a stack here I already have sponge applied now going to click on this icon right down here to add another effect on top of it the next effect I'm going to use is one that is called plastic wrap plastic wrap usually adds nice little highlights around the edges of where you have detail and with plastic wrap I could come up here and if I bring up the highlights strength you got a better idea for what it does and usually it looks like you pretty much rapped your image with reynolds wrap and it was not flat and oftentimes that's way too much so if you just turn the strength down on your plastic crap I'm gonna turn it way down it could become a very subtle effect where's just adding little highlights to make the image very a bit more then you can tell it how complex you want that to be how much detail should it bring through with details slaughter and then we also smoothness which can round things are often make them more simple uh where will allow them to remain complex so if I turn off the eyeball in plastic wrap, you'll see here it's before here's after it's just adding some subtle highlights in there to break up the other effect we already have applied on top of plastic crap. I'm going to add an additional filter. This filter is called poster edges, and with that one, I'm just gonna fine tune it. You can see how this is creating kind of a shadow effect on the edges of things, keeping a low setting so it's a little more subtle than it might otherwise be. You can see this is going to give me a much more contrast if I bring it up, so I'm gonna keep it nice and load, keep it subtle. I think in general the settings already have gonna work fine, but in fact, they did one thing wrong, and that was I didn't create a new one of these things. So if you look at what we have, we have on ly sponge in poster edges we don't have, uh, the one called plastic wrap in there, so I might need to go back to plastic wrap to say, oops, I messed up a little bit and just before I switch over to the other filter ago. Down here and say, hey, I want to add a new effect on top of that otherwise it just thinks that you weren't certain with the effect that you want it here and you just wanted to change it out for something else so now let's come in and try it with poster edges it remembered the setting so we should be fine and I'm gonna add even more after that I'm going to choose one called watercolor and you see, we're just building up more and more complex a fact building one atop the other then finally to get a little bit of a texture to it I'll read one last one last one is called rough pastels and that's what's really going to give us that texture? I think that's the same thing we're applying teo karen earlier and I'm just gonna find in the settings make it somewhere length is not very long because we already have quite a bit of texture in there. All right? So if you look at the effect that I've built up one after another, I'm just going to turn off these eyeballs here's our original picture sponge it gave us a little bit of texture plaster crap added some highlights to see in the dark portion of the image you mainly notice the highlights poster edges gave us some more depth on it watercolor made it a lot more random and then rough pastels is what gave it kind of ah feeling of the the canvas in there and, like it's been painted in. All of them put together gave me this, and all I was doing in here was experimenting. I've just simply experiment with these to start with and say, what was the first one that gave me something that had some interest? And then I I clicked on the icon that said, let me add another on top of that and experimented more. Some of it was from educated guests in that I know that plastic wrap always adds highlights. So if I found it was lacking highlights, plastic wrap was going to do it. And if I wanted that canvas feel with a little bit of ah, diagonal stroke, I need that rough pastels would do that. Other than that. The rest of these were mainly experimenting by clicking through here and looking at what it was doing to the, uh, to the image. We have a question. Does it matter what order you add those two for the for the overall effect? I mean, if you change the order of those, yes, we'll have a big effect on the image. If I do rough pastels first, then the the look where it ends up. Putting in the very fine detail of the texture of canvas, with the later filters being applied on top of that it's going to kind of throw away that texture because it's doing more aggressive things above it. So the order does matter anytime you need any really fine detail, whatever filter is adding the really, really fine like texture of canvas to it should usually be applied last. Damn. So click okay there. And here is my image what's really cool. Is that if I applied it the way I did here in that I first converted it to a smart object and then I applied these features. Well, then I never have to remember how this was done. Is long as I save this picture because if I open a different picture, I could apply these same settings to the other on the show there's a couple different ways to do it. I'm just going to open the damn door image I could select on copy and then pasted over into this file. Just going type command v is paste. And right here we have our filter gallery fight. You have convert that into a smart filter. Yeah, I could just drag it up there. All he did was I need have a smart object so I copy and paste this over converted to a smart object and I just dragged the name of the filters up there now for this particular image though it looks to me like it would need more subtle settings that have to lower some of the settings that air in there but I could come in here now and double click on filter gallery and get all the settings and end up changing them. There is another way of doing the same thing and that is when you have a smart object you could just go to the layer menu there's a choice called smart objects and you can simply choose replace contents and that means replace whatever's inside the original smart object whatever content was there at the moment huge converted into a smart object and you just feed it a different picture I'll choose the same image and that's kind of just replace the original photo that was in there same rappers before and there has the filter already applied if that image was smaller, you're going to end up with empty space around it and you would have to choose a choice called trim which will get rid of the empty space or if the image was much larger you would instead choose something called reveal all reveal all would make it so if the picture extends beyond the edge of this document that it would enlarge it to make it large the document to see all of what has gone beyond the edge. But these settings were used specifically for this image, and so I'd have to mellow out the settings a bit if I wanted to apply to the other one there's a couple disadvantages to how I applied this to the image. And that is, if you look in my layers panel it's just list all those filters that I applied is one entry called filter gallery. There are a couple other ways I could get to the exact same end result, but I might like it a little bit more in the way it's applied. I'm going to revert this image to show you the other methods because I already had some of them in here. At the very top is the way we applied this when you were watching me do it. It shows up is one entry it's called filter gallery. What I could have done is an alternative to that is, I could have gone to the filter gallery more than once. Remember how we just stacked up the effects within the filter gallery itself? Well, instead, I could have gone up to the filter menu each time I chose filter gallery, and instead of having a stack of effects here, I could have just had one then I could click okay, and when I want to apply the next one, I just go back up here to filter gallery a second time and then I apply a different effect, and if I were to do that, this is what it would look like. I would have individual entries for each one of the filters that I applied, so I happened having written down here to remind me this one would be the the sponge filter, this one would be represent plastic wrap this woman represent poster edges, this one water color and then finally rough pastels in the advantage to that is here in my layers panel, I could turn off the eyeball on each individual one to say, what would it look like if I did not apply that particular filter in? It'll update the image, and then I say, what would it look like if I didn't apply this filter? It'll update the image compared tto having it all under one eyeball, where you just universally turn off the entire effect with one eyeball instead of being able to do them individually. What I dislike about that is how my supposed to be able to figure out which filter was which they're all have the same name, filter, gallery, there's, an even better way to do it, which would give you a result that would look like this you see where it lists the actual filters that's the way I'd really like it to happen because then I can come in here and really know which one I'm turning off and give me a better idea for what's going on so let's look at how that could be done there's a preference in photo shop then I need to change what this one preference is doing is it's trying to simplify our filter menu? We're instead of showing you a bunch of other subcategories in here like the subcategory called texture instead it groups it in here into the filter gallery where that's the only place you can go to to access it so in here do you see where we have texture stylized sketch distort brushstrokes in artistic all its like little categories I could expand and then see the filters that are within that well right now we have to go into the filter gallery to access them if on the other hand I come in here and change my preferences I'm gonna go into my plug ins preference in my plug in preferences right here says show all filter gallery group s and names if I turned that on now when I go to the filter menu the menu will be longer all the filters that you usually find in the filter gallery could be accessed either through the filter gallery or manually by coming down here and choosing like texture in texturizing, whereas usually to get to these filters they don't usually even show up in the menu. You have to go to the filter gallery to get to them by changing that preference, we're going to get a longer list of filters and then if I simply stay away from the filter gallery, don't even go into it and instead when I want to add a filter to my image if I want to go too rough pastels let's say I go to the filter menu I come in here and I gotta find where is rough pastels within these sub menus, which could take a little while to find if you're not used to, uh searching through them, but I'll show you a little uh way I cheat, and of course, if you start at the bottom of the list, it will be in the top most choice but there's rough pastels. But now, since I'm not going into the filter gallery to access, then when you add rough hostels, I'll just use a generic setting and click okay? It actually shows up with the real name over in here instead of the generic name of filter gallery, and so I would prefer to apply them in that way so that I can actually see what individual applications are in here and I can turn them off one at a time with the eyeballs but to do so, I needed to go into my preferences under plug ins and turn on one check box. Now, how can I find where all those filters are? Because you saw me searching for a rough pastels? And yeah, the reason why I was searching is because I don't go to the filter menu in just hunt and peck to find it if I know the name of the filter that I want to access here's, how you get to it and I believe this might be a mac only filter a feature, so, you know, I'm gonna go to the help menu, and when you click on the help menu, it automatically highlights something called search, right? And I'm just going to start typing aro u and you see that it gives me a list of where and photo shop it has that word found if I come down here and mouse down to the choice called rough pastels, it actually shows me where it is and kind of an obvious like, look here, you know, a little arrow kind of mode. I liked a little floating like the over here, uh, and I don't even have to navigate to the menu manually, I can just get it right from the help menu. So let me do that again. It went up here clicked on help. I just started typing the name of the thing I was looking for let's say one in boss e m b oh, you know there and it tells me I just mouse down here it'll show me the different places where m bosses found and when I let go it's the same as choosing the menu command itself, but that might be a mac only philip feature I think it's part of the mac operating system but it could be wrong uh, because I don't have a windows machine to test it on. So that way, if you ever read in a magazine article and they tell you to go use some command that you have no clue where it is because sometimes in magazine articles they edit down the article to fit space and they abbreviate things and it makes it really hard to find uh, use your help menu type in whatever you're looking to find there and it's a nice waited to access it. So I had to get rid of the other two versions that aaron here and there is one more way we could do this and let's just take a little look first off remember we have a mask and so if I want this effect but I don't want the whole effect where the let's, see where the trunk of the tree is? Well, of course I could grab my paintbrush paint with black, come in here and say, hey, don't apply right here, but if I do, it's going to bring it back to the original photograph and that's probably going to stand out quite a bit compared to the painterly effect, it might be that I just don't want one or two of those filters to apply where the tree trunk is, but I do want a few of them, like maybe I want just rough past else, and I want to get rid of the others. The problem with that is we only have one mask. It affects all the filters that are applied to this. So how we gonna be able to handle this? Where I wanna have a separate mask for each one of those filters? It could be done a little bit of work involved, though, and since we've already applied, the filters is actually more difficult than if we were just starting from scratch. I'm going duplicate this layer just because we already have the filters applied, and I can keep this down here for reference then, and I'm going to get rid of all the filters in here other than the first one. It'll take a moment for to do that each time because it has to change the image back to what it looked like without that filter and that could take a little bit of time okay, this is what it looked like when I just had the sponge applied then what I'm gonna do is I'm going to turn this which is already a smart object and I'm gonna embed it into another smart object kind of weird but it's going to take whatever's in this layer right now and put it in a little protective bubble it's gonna look as if I'm urged that layer where all its features are combined so when I choose convert to smart object watching my layers pound at the top layer it no longer says sponge because the sponge effect is inside that smart object is no longer an accessory on the outside I'm just going to go here to the copy that we used before and I'm going to apply plastic wrap to it I just dragging it up there come on oh I brought photoshopped to its knees but you could usually drag it up there I don't usually do this after the fact instead I would do it while I'm working so I just apply one filter converting to a smart object again apply the next filter converting to a smart watch again apply the next filter and by doing so when you double click on it the layer. It'll pop it up to the previous state, meaning the previous filter, and you could paint on its mask. You could double click on the thumbnail for what you have and then apply it to the mask, but it doesn't look like photo shops gonna let me do it today. For those of you, though, that air into photo shop, you're into filters, you're into smart objects. It just gives you another way of thinking that you could embed one smart object inside of another, and by doing so, the the mask for the filter would be inside that smart object. You apply another filter. It's on the outside, has another mask you can paint on that mask. Put that inside of a smart object, you can put another filter on, which will have a mask, and each one could have a mask. I just don't think my computer is going to like me to do it on this particular image.

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Handbook
Practice Images

Ratings and Reviews

Kathleen
 

This is the second class on PS filters that I've taken with Ben Willmore. He is handsdown a fabulous teacher and one I highly recommend. I purchased both classes and I feel that for the price, they are worth their weight in gold. I applied his PS filter techniques to some of my surface pattern designs that were created using my original artwork and I've received great comments. So I owe a great deal of gratitude to CL and to Ben Wilmore for giving me the opportunity to grow my PS knowledge and to apply it with confidence to my artwork. Thank you!

a Creativelive Student
 

well I would recommend it sort of. I think much of the chapters show you how to use things without giving good examples or reasons such as with the brushes part. The photo on the cover is never worked on or really any of the topics didn't talk about how to achieve that look. I did learn some things as I have a lot to learn. I have been using the textures with great success. He does a nice job of explaining...I just don;t think we saw enough start to finish work.

a Creativelive Student
 

Fantastic tutor and course content! Ben Willmore truly is a master of Photoshop and has the ability to teach all aspects of Photoshop in such and easy-to-understand manner. Thanks so much for making Photoshop so much more understandable. Highly recommended.

Student Work

RELATED ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES