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
- Paint Preview
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)
- Mixing Brush Parameters
- Different Mixing Brush options
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
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
- Background Landscape layer – complete
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
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
- Background, foreground and detail layers
- Shadows added in
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
Here’s the end result, including all the layers for reference:
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