Creating a Watercolor from a Photograph
This tutorial came from my entering a challenge at
www.retouchpro.com who provided the
original picture to work with. Procedures will vary from picture to picture
depending on the lighting, colors and content. This procedure worked for
this image.
1. Open your image and duplicate your background layer.
2. Since paintings are more "fuzzy" then photographs, give this image a
motion blur of 10 and angle of 0 because most of the lines in the photograph
are horizontal.
3. To textures the image a little, apply an underpaint: click
Filter=>artistic=>underpaint. Settings used were lighting from the top left,
where light was coming from in this image. The brush size was 4, coverage
15, and with sandstone. This defined some lines, yet blended some rich
colors.
5. Use the watercolor filter to blend the colors better within the lines by
clicking Filter=>artistic=>watercolor.. All lighting for the painting
effects was from top left to go with the original lighting. Set detail to
11, shadow intensity to 0 because the shadows are intense on this picture in
the foreground already. and texture 2 to bring out the textures of the
waves.
6. The picture needed the levels adjusted to lighten it up. I did not want
the contrast increased, so I only adjusted the upper arrow setting to 180
(settings 0,1.0,180). Click on the background layer and Insert a New layer. Fill this layer with white.
7. Watercolor paintings rarely go to the edge of the paper. Created a
rectangular marquee around the outside of the image, about 50 pixels from
the edge, using a feather of 50. Inverse the selection. Using a spatter
brush for the eraser, set at 75%, use horizontal strokes to erase the edges,
going into the image. Since the feather was for 50, it allows strokes into
the image, making it look more realistic.
8. Click Select=>unselect. Then it needs to to have the texture like watercolor paper so apply
texturizer by clicking Filter=>texture=>texturizer, set to sandstone,
magnified to 200%. relief 4. The light again was from the upper left.
9. The big wave in the background was bleached out and created a hole in the
canvas. Use a 27 pixel spatter brush to draw a curved line, or twirl on a
new layer in the middle of the white area. Resize the curves smaller using
the move tool and bounding boxes. Duplicate it twice, resizing each to fit.
then set each to opacity 9, 10 and 14.
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