First Try at this... Need suggestions. Watercolor

[jpatsy]

Hi, my friend just had a baby and I wanted to create a painting effect on one of the picture she has taken of her two little ones. Here are the original and my first stab:


http://i81.photobucket.com/albums/j206/jpatsy/lucjp.jpg
http://i81.photobucket.com/albums/j2.../lucjp1try.jpg

And here is where I got the tutorial so you can see what I did:
http://www.photoshopessentials.com/p...olor-painting/

I actually like it pretty well, I really wasn't expecting greatness from my first try... but my problem is the area of her older son's lower are. All along the bottom edge, it's as if the darkness "bled" into his arm. Does anyone have any suggestions or better ways to go about this? Keep in mind, I'm not an artist... I just follow directions well.

Thanks!

[0lBaldy]

jpatsy, way to jump in there on your first post!
Welcome to RetouchPRO!
Good luck and enjoy your time here. I hope you will make many new friends here..

You may want to try some of "Swampy's" watercolor tutorials (click here).. (they are excellent)
or maybe "Palms" on using the art-history-brush (AHB) (click here) might interest you (excellent also!)

Using the tutorial you used I came up with this:

Rotated canvas 16.8 CW (clock-ways)
made selection
cloned and healed the white parts from near by areas
cropped
resized image to original 4.444 width
changed the cutout numbers to 8, 0, 2
changed the Dry Brush numbers to 1, 10, 3
changed median radius to 30

The tutorials are just a guide or beginning point, all pictures are different and may need some adjustments.. experiment with the numbers, change the opacities and modes of the layers, etc... till you get what you want..the foundation is always there to fall back on!
Above all.. Have fun!!

[jpatsy]

Thanks so much for both your suggestions and your example. Hopefully, this stuff will start to become more intuitive... right now, it's just not coming to me naturally!

[0lBaldy]

You are off to a good start.. just practice cubed and it will all fall into place!

[Peter S]

Ditto OB's comments nice pic and nice start.

I've done a quick smudge here (again check out Palms's posts), with a texture added.

Nice crop there OB.

Peter

[Gilbert]

Sorry to say I have no advice re watercolours jpatsy, just keep practising, you will improve.......in this paintered version I relocated baby to bring them closer, painted and blended and mucked about with levels.

[lkroll]

Aged painting instead. Used Xero's softmood for the blur/glow step, but it's a little more involved for the craquelure effect.

[Joeven]

Originally Posted by Gilbert

Sorry to say I have no advice re watercolours jpatsy, just keep practising, you will improve.......in this paintered version I relocated baby to bring them closer, painted and blended and mucked about with levels.

Excellent!


Joe

[palms1]

I can see that this photo is something special to be kept and everyone has done great versions
Jpatsy we all started somewhere and took one step at a time just practice and enjoy, Dont be afraid to ask questions or for help either

On my version thought i would do something different

Palms

[xbo0z0odx]

Hi Patsy,
Let me start by saying your picture is fantastic. The subject interaction/composition is priceless, esp. to the parents. Your choice of background is also great. If I have one criticism, it would be the lighting. But, other than that, great picture.

I'm a noob at photoshop and the whole portrait to paintings (etc) genre, so take all this for what it's worth. I have been a lurking here for quite some time though, and I consider myself a fairly quick learner.

I have read through the tutorial you posted a couple of times, and can't really see what step exactly generates the problem you are describing. But, if you compare the before and after pictures of the tutorial, you can see that portions of the sky/clouds are 'blown' out like the bottom of the picture you worked on. What you can do, is take it step by step again, and the step prior to when that area gets blown out might be the likely culprit. It might be combination of several steps however, but if you can narrow it down, and find the particular step, then you can just add a layer mask to that step, then fill the mask with black. At that point, whatever effect you were trying to achieve with that particular step will disappear, but will actually still be there, you just have to paint it back in with a soft white brush. Just take care to not paint it back into the area that was 'blown' out.

Make sense? Hope that helps. If it produces more questions, I'll help if I can.

At any rate, here's my smudge technique in Photoshop. Really liked what OlBaldy did with the crop. Added a border, but not sure what to think about it...


Edit: Forgot to add, everyone's version is exceptional. I especially like your take on it Palms. Cheers.