I recently re-discovered a technique for creating a painting-like effect with my images. It’s really a neat effect, one that I think a lot of photogs could use to give some of their photos an “artsy” feel. Here’s the tutorial:

1. Open up your image in Photoshop.
2. Duplicate the image.
3. Select duplicate (Shown below).

4. Fill image with white (or black, it doesn’t matter) by going to Edit > Fill… or by pushing ctrl + backspace on the keyboard.
5. Select the Art History Brush Tool located just above the eraser tool.

6. There are a number of parameters that can be set with this tool. These include:

– Brush size
– Mode
– Opacity
– Style
– Area

For right now, just set the brush size between 15 and 30. Set the style to Tight Long, and the area to 300 px. Opacity should be 100% and Tolerance should be set to 0.

7. Paint over the white canvas (make sure the duplicated image is still selected). You should start to see the original image reappearing. It should, however, now appear to have a paint-like effect applied to it. See the example image below:

8. Continue to brush over the image until it has fully reappeared with the new filter applied to it.

Experiment with brush size and area; the smaller the brush size, the more detail you’ll get, the smaller the brush area, the more minute of touch-ups you can do.

Also try out the different style types. There are several different choices to choose from, each providing their own unique paint-like impression.

One of the best ways I have found the achieve the effect I’m going for is to start out with a brush size of about 40, using the tight long style, and to paint in the entire image first. This ensures that I don’t have any white showing through when I get more detailed with a smaller brush size. Then I typically resize my brush to about 10-15 to paint over the entire image, and a size 3 brush for faces and other things that need fine detail. This usually gives me the look I want, and makes a fun, unique image to offer to clients.

Hope you enjoy this fun tool…