I had such a lot of fun with this image, so I wanted to ask everyone else to see what they could come up with. It's a kinda blah image on it's own. Needs some spicing up.

On mine I made two images, ran buzz and PMartgallery hand drawing on one darkened it up and buzzed it again. Then I adjusted the contrast for good strong lines. Then I took the image and ran VP oil painting with the canvas material turned way up, normal deformation and rendering.

The other image I buzzed and ran impressionist paint-smudges antique, with the brush size set at 200 with a sepia toned background. Merged the two on Darkest. Then softened the whole thing.

I like the resulting textures and colors.

AmyHutton

Very interesting pic to play with, Amy. Thanks for posting it. Your final result definitely captures a rustic look.

I used the Buzz "Palette Knife" stack one one layer and a modified setting of the Impressionist Pencil Chalk-Soft Detailed Pastels style. This modification was made by clicking the "More Controls" button and chosing "Color" from the menu. At the bottom of the screen is dropdown menu labeled "Palette," from which I chose "Rainbow."

I created a layer of "lines" by applying Smart Blur/Edges only to the original background, then inverted the result (CTRL + I). These lines were pretty intense, so I applied the Photoshop Stylize > Diffuse > Anisotropic and Colored Pencil filters to soften them up a bit. See layers palette snapshot for the blending and layer sequence details.

~Danny~

Showoff !!!

An impressionist take on this one . . .

Patricia

To get starting image for both versions:

sharpen
marble effect, Painter 8, back to Photoshop
select lum
ink outlines
invert select luminosity
pattern fill
watercolor action
Version 1, anisotropic
Version 2, layers palette shown

What a great photo to work with. I love "castles." (any old building :dizzy: )

Amy, I love how you got the blend of canvas and painted texture. It's a favorite look that I only sometimes achieve.

Danny--I think I'll second what kiska said ;-)

Kiska--I've got a little over 3 weeks until summer vacation. I'm looking forward to playing with painter this summer.

oops--sorry I missed you Patricia. I guess I got sidetracked touring your pbase gallery. You have a lot of beautiful images there.

I tried 2 different things and neither was quite what I wanted, so I blended them together. One was the sketch layer painted in with the history brush and then run through impressionist and paint engine. The other was the CYMK mask followed by impressionist and paint engine. After blending the 2 images, I added a pattern fill layer in soft light.

For those who asked for my impressionist presets, I went ahead and put my impressionist actions at the same link. Most of them aren't too good (they were some of my first attempts), but I did add the CYMK process to the action set.