PHOTO ART: Mini-Challenge #51- Village in Europe

[jerry]

Wanda and Phyllis
Thanks for the comments this was fun to fool with..

Phyllis
I am pretty sure that I remember what I did..Steps are as follows:

I used Iglogans sketch procedure word for word except I did no sepia coloring.

I used that as my background.

I added the original pic above the background opacity 25%

I created a new layer set to color and painted with a wet brush (brush heavy flow scatter) after sampling the colors from the original this layer is at 100% opacity.

Colors were a little light so I copied the color layer and set to multiply..this layer is below the color layer set at 45% opacity.

Thats it have fun

Jerry

[platscha@cs.com]

Great effects, you both achieved really nice effects on your work.

[dcarr]

Wish I could say I did it myself, but I used an action from Mike Finn's actions. Oil painting. However, before I did I add the cutout filter from ps7 on my own...ta da!
I am learning from the actions, but it's going to take a while. In the meantime I'll post some nice things when I get them.
Debbie

[Helena]

I've never gotten the hang of pastels in real life so I find doing it with Photoshop very satisfying!

I mucked around a bit with this but the main thrust of what I did is as follows:

Duped picture. (duh)

Applied artistic filter - rough pastels.

Did it again to the background (distant hills) only to pump up their texture since they looked flat compared to the houses.

Rotated the canvas 90 degrees and ran rough pastels again. (This insured that I didn't get lines in only one direction. This is a pet peeve of mine since it always looks too "photoshoppy" to me when it happens.)

I still wasn't happy with this (still wasn't arty enough...too much like the real photo in tone) so I went a bit further.

Ran an artistic - cutout filter on it to break the picture up into as many colour blocks as I could (top slider set to 8).

Then I did the rough pastels, rotate 90 degrees, rough pastels again. This was definitely arty enough but now I had lost too much detail so I reduced the opacity of the layer to let the original photo peek through a bit.

As a final touch I used the sponge tool (set to saturate) to pump up the colours of the vegetation/flowers and the brown roofs. (In my experience pastel people often use bright colours because the medium lends itself so well to this)

So what do you think? I wish I had a printer that could do this justice!

By the way...I always learn so much from this site and all your submissions! I've copied lots of your techniques and wasted many enjoyable hours staying up until 3 am playing with photos. thanks everyone

[pstewart]

Originally posted by Helena
By the way...I always learn so much from this site and all your submissions! I've copied lots of your techniques and wasted many enjoyable hours staying up until 3 am playing with photos. thanks everyone.

Ditto, Helena...it's 3:09 as I type this.

I like your pastel version a lot. You gave it depth and shading and brightness but still kept it sketchy. Nice job!

Debbie, nice action effect you've got there. And I like the way you used cutout first--daring experiment that paid off!

Chuck, you managed to get rid of those annoying speckled edges on the original! Looks great!

Phyllis

[omeyas]

Village.

[DannyRaphael]

Debbie:

A late, but heartfelt reply... Don't feel a twinge of guilt about using actions. That would be like feeling guilty because you didn't bake that loaf of bread from scratch or bought butter at the store instead of churning it. Think of an action as a "power tool" if you will, helping you achieve results faster.

If you want to learn some cool techniques, Mike Finn's actions are among the most innovative I've ever seen. I'm in the process of dissecting another of his actions at this time. He's a genius; learn from his recipes.

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Helena:

W E L C O M E !

Really glad you could join us. Always nice to have new members who live close to Seattle so we can make bets on who will see sunshine first! (Sunny Victoria? )

Greatly appreciate the effort you put into the "how to" steps. That ensures folks 2-3-4 years down the road will be able to apply them to their own efforts. Well done.

Hope you find many more interesting things to try until 3:00 a.m. It's a great way to spend time and have fun.

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Chuck:

I could make out the texturing, but the image is pretty small so I couldn't see much else. If you like click the EDIT button for your post.

In the Attach File section, click the "Replace" button and specify a link to a replacement (larger?) image.

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With all these pretty renditions, make me think I should seriously consider a trip to Europe someday.

~Danny~

[Cheryl H]

This photo appealed ot me right away, but I had a hard time coming up with something I liked better than the original image.

I'm playing with my impressionist filter today. Several layers with different blending modes--at least 1 charcoal, a couple of watercolors, and a colored pencil in there somewhere. I'm still playing with the filter, so I haven't figured out which ones are the "good ones" yet. I put a couple of sketchy layers and a texture on the top.

[Cheryl H]

Don, You may find this link interesting.
http://planeta.terra.com.br/informat...ad/impbrsh.htm

[annadarling]

All these great interpretations inspired me to try this one too. As usual, I think I'm in over my head, but it was fun!

[Mal Firth]

Using the steps I detailed in my post about the holiday barge in the Show and Tell section (see http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/sho...&threadid=6501) I came up with this watercolor.

[tenneysmith]

thought I would try turning into a pencil drawing first to see how that looked..... i thought it looked ok then ran the xero lithograph filter on it which added more dots and lines so I sharpened them with sharpen edges. I played with the color balance twice which added a tint of gold to the overall piece. I discovered this process quite by accident last night. It worked well on images with well defined lines and dots .... blurry, hazy photos did not respond well to this process. Cathy

[e.b.west]

I tried this:

made 3 dupe layers

1. Smart blur>overlay edges>invert, set to soft light

2. Artistic>poster edges soft light

3. Artistic>underpainting, soft light

Flatten, put a sandstone texture and ran an edge action I got somewhere.

[catia]

Simple watercolor done in PSP8 and PS7.

Catia

[SkyEWR]

Well, Heres my go at a pencil sketch.

I used a technique I learned when I first started playing around with image editing.

Duplicated the layer...negative image..grayscale. Changed to dodge..gaussian blur of 5...merge. Framed it..and there ya have it.