Theory
There are two new features used for painting in Photoshop CS5. The first one is the new Brush Tip options.
- New options in the Brushes Panel
With the new brushes, you can control the number of bristles, length,
thickness and stiffness and not only can you see the result in the
brush panel, you also get an overlay window that shows you the 3D
virtual brush and its bristles.
- Paint Preview
I am not really a big fan of the brush preview window but thankfully you can turn it off if you find it distracting.
The second ingredient in the digital paint toolbox is the
Mixer Brush.
The Mixer Brush is like a combination of the normal brush and the
smudge tool. As you paint, it smudges and mixes the color, as if you
were using wet paints.
- Regular brush (left) and Mixing brush (right)
The way the brush color is mixed with the canvas is controlled by
three parameters – the wetness of the paint, the load of the brush and
the mix amount between the paint color and the canvas color.
- Mixing Brush Parameters
To illustrate these parameters, I brushed quickly over an image with different settings:
- Different Mixing Brush options
So, a heavy load will carry more paint over a stroke than a light
load; wetness smudges and mixes the canvas color with the paint color; a
high mix rate will use more of the canvas color than the paint color.
Practice
The real magic with the Mixing Brush is that you can paint using the
colors from a picture, effectively helping to you turn a photo into a
painting with little effort.
To demonstrate this, I will start with a nice photo I took 10 years ago on film.
- The original photo
Create a new transparent layer. Select the Mixing Bush and from the top bar choose the preset
Very Wet, Heavy Mix; choose the brush that you want from the Brushes panel and make it a big size.
To paint on the new layer using the colors from the background, with the Mixing Brush tool selected, make sure that the option
Sample All Layers at the top is selected. Deselect the icon (Load the brush after each stroke) then
Alt-click on the image to load the brush and start painting on the new layer.
To paint effectively, you need to think in terms of layers, from
background to foreground and from broad to detail. Therefore we’ll start
painting the background, using broad strokes with a large brush tip,
ignoring the shack/cabin completely. Your strokes should more or less
follow the contours of the terrain and clouds.
Hide the background layer temporarily to see the effect so far:
- Background (landscape) layer – work in progress
As you can see, I smudged the colors over the shack as if it did not
exist. Also, notice how my strokes follow the hills and the shapes of
the clouds. Keep working until you fill the layer and are happy with the
result.
- Background Landscape layer – complete
Next, we need to paint the cabin. It’s better to paint it on its own
layer so that if you decide to change anything, it doesn’t mess with the
background.
To do that, you need to hide the landscape layer, create a new one
and paint on it. This time you’ll ignore the landscape and do just the
cabin. You also need to make the brush tip smaller. Make sure the
background photo is visible so it can pick the colors from it.
- Cabin / Shack – complete
If you look at the roof, you’ll see that I erased from it some parts I
did not like – this is why it’s a good practice to work on separate
layer.
Now that we have the broad strokes, it’s time to bring in the
details. Repeat the process – hide the shack layer, make sure the
background photo is visible, make the brush tip even smaller, create a
new layer and start painting on it. This time you no longer need to fill
all the stuff, just short, fine strokes in the areas you want detail.
- Details – distant, grass and shack
If you show all layers, this is what we get:
- Background, foreground and detail layers
Not bad. We still want to add some more details like shadows. Create a new layer and set its mode to
Multiply
and opacity to around 60%. Choose a Dry Mixing Brush – now we don’t
need to mix with the background – and black for color. Paint the shaded
areas.
- Shadows added in
At this point you can leave it as it is, or you can add a final
touch. One of the nice things about oil paint is that it has thinkness.
To give this kind of tridimensional effect, you need to create a merged
copy of the layers. The easy way is to duplicate all layers and then
merge the copy (quickest route: select the layers and press
Shift+CTRL+ALT+E or
Shift+CMD+OPT+E on Mac). Now you should have a new merged layer in addition to the original ones.
An even better method would be to select the layers, choose
Layer –> Smart Objects –> Convert to Smart Object and then duplicate this smart object via
Layer –> Duplicate Layer or
CTRL+J (
CMD+J on Mac). This method is better because it leaves the contents of the smart object editable as well as the Emboss effect.
Whichever method you chose, with this new layer selected, choose
Filters –> Stylize –> Emboss and in the dialog enter some values like below:
- Emboss Dialog
Make sure
Height is relatively small – this depends on how large your canvas is, and make sure you crank the
Amount all the way to the max. You can always tone the effect down later with opacity. With this emboss layer, set the mode to
Overlay.
Here’s the end result, including all the layers for reference:
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