Creative Portraits: Flower Girl

[Neve]

There are lots of quality photos available from:-

http://www.sxc.hu/browse.phtml

Many of which are without restriction in their usage such as this delightful photo by Damascus aka Jeff Osborn.

Enjoy!

[JustChecking]

Lovely photo

i wanted to give it somewhat dreamy feeling... dunno what went wrong

numbers next to names of imp. filters are brush sizes; lino chatter run had brightness 50, contrast 50...

[Axleuk]

Sorry guys, just messing with this one so took no attention of the process.

Maybe i will figure it out and post the technique, but it took me 3 hours of playing with setting.

[Neve]

Nice result JC - lovely colouring and texture. Axle - good result, I haven't done cutout work for a long time, it's nice to see someone give it a go again.

Painter 8.1

Cloning and tracing paper.
Artists/Impressionist
Size=6/Opacity=40/Resat=18/Bleed=84/Jitter=1

Shoes Hair and Pants

Opacity reduced to 13% - Face

I went over almost all of her again to reveal more detail as I went. Sometimes 3 times.

Soft Cloner over parts to reveal more detail for eyes, mouth, ears, shadows.

Same brush used in a circular motion for the surrounding grass and florals, did this once only. 18 size/Opacity=48%

Dropped all layers and opened in PSP8.1

Slight Blur
Canvas Texture twice and slightly sharpened.

Renoir would probably be horrified with this but I quite like it....

[jaykita]

Neve, i think your "Renoir" is beautiful. Axle, wish you'd remember your method. I could go into business using it! Honest. Justchecking, you could try using a gaussian layer around 30 setting, hardlight blend, for that dreamy look.
Here's mine. I used a median layer, lighten blend, increased saturation, and played around with selective colors. Finally, a smartblur.

[jaykita]

Used my earlier post with texturizer-sandstone-fade -mode multiply, opac100. I like this one much better than the earlier, so decided to send it in.

[Neve]

Thanks Jaykita, much appreciated. I like this last one, the texture finishes it off beautifully.

I was studying a tutorial by Steven Friedman here:-

http://www.digitalartmasterworks.com...ic_H20_pg1.htm

which I think is just fantastic and have spent a couple of hours trying to achieve something similar. It led me to creating this 2nd try of the Flower Girl and although it was a bit of a pallaver (for moi), I liked the result. In the process finally found the "blenders" in Painter 'better late than never!"

After looking at Steven's 2nd image with MS PhotoDrawII effect applied, it spurred me to get Impressionist re-installed and instal Mike Finn's set, also yours Jaykita - the two WC effects are just marvellous and thank you for sharing them. I had to miss doing Steven's Scanned WC brushstrokes picture altogether.

...................................

Cropped and resized image.
Saved one image as original.
Two copies of this image – naming one FG1 and the other FG2

IN PSP8.1
Open FG1 and dupe this layer.
L2 – Impressionist Filter/Mike Finn’s Set.
Mode Normal – Opacity 50%
Merged and flattened and saved as FG1

PAINTER 8
Opened FG2 – Woodcut Effect and saved.
Opened FG1 and pasted FG2 image as 2nd layer.
Mode – Gel – 14% opacity.
Bottom layer – Blenders/Just add Water
Blended all of the green background and her face,
Hands and arms to smooth out.
Dropped all layers.
Saved as FG1

PSP8.1
Opened FG1 and placed over original image.
Erased to show her eyes and teeth more.
Merged and flattened.
Applied a mask.

[Legacy~Art]

Well i had to try this one again with the more plugins and knowledge i have obtained over the past 2 weeks...

First i boosted the color...

Then i added a duplicated and added septia layer then i erased the parts i didnt want to leave the color...

Then i added trimoons impressionist plugin (sorry i am hooked on this)

Then i added a Mask to make the jagged edges...

[DannyRaphael]

Thanks, Neve, for the very cute Pic.

- - - - - - -

Alex...

Did you ever figure out that wood-cut effect? Your results are among the best I've seen.

- - - - - - -

This one is a knockoff of JustChecking's technique described here.

On the Glowing Edges layer, I used blend mode Color Burn instead of Screen.

On the top Impressionist layer I used custom style #djrOils24, faded to about 50% instead of the Watercolor style.

~Danny~

[Neve]

Lovely result Danny

[SWEngineer]

I though this was pretty neat. Here's how I emulated what he did (see layers pallete):

Cropped the image. Created two threshold masks using Levels mid slider to fine tune. (Probably levels doesn't do anything you couldn't get with threshold alone. My Dark & Light mask layers were created by MergeVisible with different settings of Threshold to emphasize different elements of the picture.) Lowered opacity of the top mask to 50% and stamped visible (This gives only black, white or 50% gray in the image.) Used magic wand selections and a bit of hand painting to turn the grey areas black or white as desired. Now we have a full B&W mask. (If a single threshold setting gets what you want, all the better. However you get there, the goal is a single, well defined B&W mask.)

Found a nice wood pattern off Google image search. (Axle's is much nicer. Wish I had this pattern.) Here's a link to my source if folks are interested:

http://www.worldpanel.com/braewood%20pictures.htm

Fill a new layer with the wood pattern. Refine as desired (color, levels, etc). Now add a Hue/Sat adjustment layer above this. Go to the B&W mask, select all, and copy. Open the Hue/Sat mask for editing and paste the B&W image into this. Now invert the mask and leave mask edit mode. Adjust Saturation, Lightness, and maybe Hue to get a nice contrast for the cutout. Merge visible to a new layer. Create a selection using the Hue/Sat mask, copy from the new MergeVis layer and paste. On the newly created layer from paste, add an InnerShadows (Low) layer style. That's it.

- Mark (w/ apologies to Axle)

[Neve]

Well I'll be Mark, I decided to give this a go too but not with the flower girl.
Well done, you got a great result. You worked it out alright and thanks for the details too. I'm not too good with those layer masks yet.

I'll post this anyway.

Danny, I’m not all that familiar with PS but had a fiddle around in there re the wood cut effect. In PSP this is very easily achieved via “cutout” which has an entirely different meaning in PS of course.

I had an original piece of BW clipart. In PSP I placed it over an empty layer and used
The Transparency filter, eliminate white. Saved as PSD and opened in PS.

Put an empty layer under this transparent lineart and filled with a wood effect.
Then clicked on Lineart layer, magic wand and selected inside the clipart, using
Shift and magic wand to pick up pieces missed whilst selecting. I then filled that
Too with the same wood pattern. Do NOT deselect.

New Styles Layer – Inner Shadow/Contour – cove Deep.
Distance 23/Normal/Opacity 75%

[DannyRaphael]

Mark, Neve... Great work. I'm going to break these out into a separate thread later so it will be easier for others to find this technique.

Mark:

Were layers Light Mask and Dark Mask based on different Threshold settings to get the coverage you wanted?

~Danny~

[Neve]

Glad to help!

[Janet Petty]

Neve, Mark, It Works! Hurrah! I'm so glad you both came up with great techniques. I didn't find any wood patterns I was overly fond of so I took a picture of wet sandstone that I have for background/textures and used it.

TY TY TY

Janet

[lkroll]

Here's my take.

http://img176.exs.cx/img176/8809/flowergirlrndr6bb.jpg

Big picture hosted by Image Shack

[Neve]

Yeah....good one Janet! Try it on some text next using whatever bg you like.

Something like this...

http://karenscreations.infinology.net/cutout.htm

[Peter S]

Cropped
Smoothed
Tweaked colours (loadsa green there)
Simplifier plugin
Diffuse
Added halftone overlay
Tweaked colours some more.

Peter

[Steve Conway]

A happy child in a bed of flowers. About as serene as one can get.

Steve

[Mohammed]

Great pic

I like Neve's second rendition a lot (the one with the flower at the lower right)

Here's my try, went less painterly on this one to keep the girl beautiful smile

[JimJam]

Very nice,very nice Mohammed.

[Steve Conway]

Cropped and added a few paint strokes.

Steve

[palms]

messing around with a sketch layer and blendmodes and of to do some more messing had another idea ! ! ! ! ! ! !

Palms

p.s. more messing sketch and ahb this time

[Mohammed]

Hi palms1

I really like this effect ! Kind of little color strokes that achieve a sketch (the first pic) could you please give more details on how you did it please ?

Regards

[palms]

Hi Mohammed

certainly here are the steps i took

basic sketch ( duplicate original > desaturate > duplicate > invert > change blend mode to colour dodge > Gaussian blur ( i use around the 4.0 ) > merge down which leaves the sketch layer and original ) best thing i have done so far is to make this into a action

On the sketch layer go to filter > cut out i used settings 8, 0, 2, change blend mode to Luminosity

then just fiddle around i used a white brush to get rid of the bits i didnt want (can be done on either layer, but i think the sketch one is easiest )

also altered the colour to taste

hope this makes sense to you dont hesitate to ask any questions
and i hope you meant the first one, if not let me know


Palms

[Steve Conway]

Originally Posted by Peter S

Cropped
Smoothed
Tweaked colours (loadsa green there)
Simplifier plugin
Diffuse
Added halftone overlay
Tweaked colours some more.

Peter

Really like this technique.

I have tried and come close, but haven't hit on it yet. Tried a combination of smoothing with Lucis Art and then layered with the plastic wrap filter. But as I say, not yet. Might come closer with PS which I don't use.

Steve C.

[Mohammed]

Thank you Palms, got it, quite simple but very effective

Thanks again

[alexmeta]

There is AHB on Gertrudis background

[pavel123]

Steve, l like your second rendition, great painting effect.

Palms, I vote for your second renditions as well, I would've asked you how you did it, but I suspect the it's AHB and a sketch (??)

Pavel

[pavel123]

My try.

Pavel