Life-long buds!

Photo by M. Casey.

What beautiful girls!

The most difficult part of this one, for me, was removing the effects of JPEG compression and over-sharpening!

1) JPEG cleanup
2) Touch-up work on dark-haired girls neck and shoulder to remove green color cast
3) Lighten eye highlights
4) Edge-preserving smooth
5) duplicate layers
6) Amphisoft Convolution Shaman on Top layer -- Sharpen radius = 360, opacity = 50%
7) flatten
8) Enhance Edges
9) Soften some edges with soften tool
10) resize & save.

-Jeff

Nicely done, Jeff and the detail is much appreciated.

I'm still experimenting with variations of Mike Finn's Insta-sketch [beta] action, available for the moment here: http://homepages.slingshot.co.nz/~mikefinn/action.html

The following represents the final layer stack, but does not reflect a lot of the interim layer mask and cloning work. The point of all this is to illustrate how the output of Insta-sketch can be combined with other effects.

Layers Palette (top to bottom)
K. Output of Insta-sketch Watercolor (blend = color)
J. Copy of original background. (Luminosity). Used layer mask to selectively restore some detail around eyes, mouth.
I. G + Unsharp mask
H. G + Diffuse > Anisotropic
G. Merge E, F
F. Clone out noise
E. Merge of A, B, C & D
D. Levels (to lose some of the midtone noise)
C. Find Edges + Desaturate (Darken); detail selectively applied with Layer Mask
B. Levels (to lose some of the midtone noise)
A. Output of Insta-sketch Pencil
Background

You probably know that sometimes actions work great on parts of an image, but not on others. Ditto with filters. Layer D reflects "the best of" the Insta-sketch pencil layer and the layer rendered by Photoshop's Find Edges filter. Levels was used on each to "get rid of a lot of the noise." You do this by moving the black and white (end) sliders towards each other. It's a trial and error process.

Anyway, this was a different approach and was fun.

~Danny~

[Jeff. I WILL get to the Impressionist TRY-IT. Just ain't got there yet!]

Cant believe so few felt like artifying these friends hope they still are lifelong friends

Palms

Palms

X L ENT


Peter

Lil' chums.

Steve C.

Glad you re-opened this thread Palms. Thought I would give it a fake brush try (faking it using a GIMP Warpsharp Script-fu). :)

Nice find Palms

My try with Art History.

Peter

Very cute picture.
It went from a sketch to a painting.

Tried something new in making a selection. I used my favorite - Fuzz Ball - brush in QuickMask mode to make the edge selection. Ergo the spiky edges around the girls. Switched to a large round brush to quickly paint in the faces (inside the edges).

Couple of runs of Dry Brush on a duplicate of the girls. Masked back in the eyes with a low opacity spatter brush so as not to distroy the dry brush effect. Merged down.

Under the girls, I added a white layer and below that a soft green layer. Mask on the white layer and used a Leaf brush to reveal the green below around the outside edges of the girls.

Fun project. Thanks for the play.