Paintography Example 1. Removing or fading the background to enhance the flower.

Original Image to start with

1.  Paintography is about creating a work of art from a photograph to make it look like an oil painting and we create the effect using Photoshop and Pixel Bender. Some of the actions or plugins can be downloaded from here: Maybe only works with CS5. [download page] IMPORTANT: Remember this is your work of art and you should do it to your liking stop anytime you think the photo looks OK. There are no rules here it is your work of art. Paintography does not work very well on some images but you will soon learn which are best and start taking photos especially to create your paintography art.

Fade out the background

2.  Using the eye dropper tool take a sample of the dark area of the background and using a large soft brush set at 20% go over the background around the flower to fade it out do it until you like the effect or take it all out as I did. 3.  Go to the menu under Image/adjustments/ levels. And select channels and choose Red. Move the slider slightly to brighten the colors of the flower and darken the background, do it to your liking. If you want to use any other method of color enhancement do it now.

Pixel bend brighten and sharpen

4.  Select the Burn Tool and set the Range to Shadow. Use a large soft brush set at about 50% and go over the green leaves on the image background. BUT not over the entire flower until you are satisfied with the result, you may like it with some green left in. 5.  Now switch to the Dodge Tool set it to about 50% Midtones and go over the edges of the petals just to brighten them up where you hit whilst using the Burn tool. You may also use the levels again to increase the color and brightness. 6.  I like to pre-sharpen the image at this point. I use Nik Sharpener. But any sharpener will do. And then go to File/Pixel Bender/ Choose Oil Paint. You can choose the settings by moving the sliders. My settings are: Stylization 6.  Cleanliness 4.  Colorization 1.35.  Brush Scale 0.1.  Brush Contrast 0.

7.  Crop your picture to your own taste and do any touch ups that may need to be done, I sometimes use the Blur Tool here set on Saturate at 50% to brighten the colors, works best on orange like colors. Remember the History command in Photoshop and you can go back. I very rarely use layers but if you wanted to you could use layers all of your changes as they happen. Your picture is now done and you can add the Frame. This is an action called Marcia’s Frame you can get it from the [download page]    Tutorial Videos >>

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