Creative interpretations: Portrait - Jennifer Garner

[Janet Petty]

Very, very nice Gold. The technique you describe sounds awfully close to the one I've been doing. Great minds???

[DannyRaphael]

Originally Posted by Janet Petty

Very, very nice Gold. The technique you describe sounds awfully close to the one I've been doing. Great minds???

I'll say. Exceptionally great & creative minds.

[Axleuk]

Painte IX:

Wet Oil Clone Brush

Straight forward clone...

[Neve]

Axle - Very smooth, beautifully done.

[Axleuk]

Thanks Neve....

[Duv]

Haven't tried this one yet so here goes..

Fu2: Contrast Enhancement by Overlay
P.S.: Filter: Offset:Minimum 1 Fade Minimum.
Xero: Supersmooth X 2
Xero: Soft Mood Fade Soft Mood
Selected Blouse with Color Range and used Levels to bring back detail.
PhotoFrame: Watercolor

Cheers
Dave

[SWEngineer]

Duv, Very nice! I love the smooth, lusterous skin tones you produced.

Axel, I'm running out of superlatives to describe your work. Did you change backgrounds in Painter or elsewhere? I made a real mess when I tried to mix cloning and (hand) painting in a new background in Painter. You did it beautifully what ever trick you used.

-Mark

[jaykita]

Hello Mark.
I see you have a great wish to learn about Painter. I have painter 8.
I know you have addressed your question to Axle, hope you both dont mind my taking the liberty. (Besides, you did ask me in another thread "mountain man", i think). Also hope nobody minds my posting this image here.
The answer to your question on backgrounds lies in layers and layer blends. For this image, i started with 4 blank layers for my cloning, apart from the original image in another window which was my clone source. For the bottom layer i went to effects-fill, and put in a gradient fill with blue and black as my colors. (Full opacity in the fill window) And default blend in layers palette. The next layer was filled with pattern, layer palette opacity 84, multiply blend. The 3rd layer (again default blend) was blank on which i cloned with whatever brush took my fancy....as u can see from the various effects. Dont forget to depress the clone button on the color palette. That way you get to use MOST brushes for cloning. The 4th or uppermost was again filled with gradient fill with red and blue colors. (21 opacity for the other layers to show through - this is done in the fill palette) On this layer i used an eraser partly to reveal lower layers.
This creation is not very good, and didnt take me long to do. But i do hope it answers your question.

[SWEngineer]

I sure appreciate the help. I'm still having some issues cloning cleanly (keeping the background I DONT want from getting cloned in at the edges of the parts I DO want.) But I'm making progress in part thanks to your tip for building a good layer stack before starting to clone.

[Axleuk]

Whilst jaykita's technique is specific to Painter, i find it a lot easier to do any post image modification in Photoshop first, this give you more control and a lot more options to experiment with.

In Photoshop, depending on the picture, i use the Pen tool to outline my subject, normally zoomed up close at pixel level to give me more precise control over edge definition.

Dont worry too much about exact extraction, as the painting will hide any small abnormalities.

Dont give up, keep trying...

[Neve]

I second that Axle re doing post work which I always do in PSP8.1. I never work on an image at any time (whether it's to be done eventually in Painter or any other program) without seeing how I can improve on it, balance it etc. In particular bringing details out of the shadows...on hair by example I'll use the lighten tool in those cases to reveal more details. There are few images that don't need anything done at all.

[SWEngineer]

With a lot of good advice & encouragement, Axle's tutorial and some practice, I've come up with a Painter portait I'm not ashamed to post. Here are a few thoughts to share regarding what I think helped me:

1) The "Brush Tracking" pref scratch pad doesn't work for me. I ended up setting it manually to much lower 'Pressure' settings than the automatic mode was generating (scale 0.43, pwr 2 vs. scale ~0.7, pwr >3.5). This gave me much more control over the brush and enabled much better coverage on my 1st pass brush strokes.

2) Painter takes much more up-front planning than what I had gotten used to making art with filters and plugins. In my rush, I was always cloning to the Canvas layer. Now I'll make sure to use a separate layer a least one level above the canvas. Jaykita, Axel, and Neve pointed the way here. Thanks all of you.

3) With care, you can do some decent alterations in Painter itself. (Maybe just minor ones if you're just rookie like me.) Here it's worth noting the importance of the "pickup underlying color" check box in the layers palette. With out it, I think you'll struggle to get decent blending between hand painted and cloned layers / techniques. I know this discovery helped solve many of my problems.

For this work, I started in Elements2 first creating a new background for the model. (Basically ripping-off what I'm sure Axel must have done on his image, complete with the drop shadow.) Then I did a bit of 'glamour' retouching with NeatImage to smooth out the skin tones and other noise [probably completely pointless given I was headed for Painter] and Filter>Distort>Liquify to pull up the corner of the model's mouth a bit. I finished in Elements by cloning out some of her lower lip which I though was a bit too thick (vertically). On to Painter. I used the FineSprayCloner35 on the background. (It did ugly things to the model, but the background turned out ok and this way it doesn't look so much like a blatent copy of Axel's work.) I used the WetOilsCloner10 everywhere else, and am starting to get a sense of how to vary brush size appropriately. To further make this image my own, I got a little creative with the models blouse. I did this on a new Painter layer above the one I was cloning on using the WetOils cloner brush, but in "real painting" mode, sampling colors manually from the cloned image. Back to Elements2 for a nice vignette.

-Mark

Edited image in response to comments from Jaykita & Axle below.

[jaykita]

Originally Posted by SWEngineer

With a lot of good advice & encouragement, Axle's tutorial and some practice, I've come up with a Painter portait I'm not ashamed to post. -Mark

Bravo! Very good progress indeed! However, u've missed her belly button (if thats what it is) by a good 4-6", i'd say

[Axle-uk]

Mark - Congrats on your creation, not that hard really is it ?

A few points to make:

Appearance:
Whilst i like the idea of Vignetting, in this case, it doesnt really help, but rather hinder the beauty of the image. When you create something as nice as this, you dont really want close it down, you want to open it up so we can see it in all is glory, by applying the vignette you have constricted her.

The colour you have used for the background i think would be better if it were a little softer, its comes acrosss as a little too stronge for the subject, perhaps a nice light mint green. (my example is also a little too dark)

I like what you have done with her jacket, and works very well with the pose, but spoilt slightly a small misplacement of her navel, it seems out of place to me, what you think ?

Technique:
You nailed it !!!! You seriously have done a good job, you should be applauded. The more you practise it on other images, the more natural it will become and you will be able to see it in your work.

Keep up the good work.

[DannyRaphael]

Bravo, Mark. This is excellent progress.
...and bravo, too, for Axel's tutorial.

Check out the "grainy" brushes in the Blender group, next.