Transcripts
1. Paint a Photo in Photoshop - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this Graphic Design for Lunch class, Paint A Photo In Adobe Photoshop. Graphic Design for Lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're looking at creating a digital painting from a photograph in Photoshop. We'll start out by preparing our image, and then we'll go ahead and do the underpainting. We'll paint our image and then finish off with some color and texture effects. Now, as you're working through these videos, you might see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, give it a thumbs up. These recommendations help me get my classes in front of more people just like you, who want to learn more about Photoshop. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments, and I look and respond to all of your class projects. Now if you're ready, let's get started on creating a digital painting from a photo in Photoshop.
2. Paint a Photo - Part 1: Before we can paint a photo in Photoshop, we're going to need something to paint and I've chosen this image to work with. The background in this image is almost non-existent, which makes it a nice image to paint. But you can still find something that has a background. Just try to find something that's not too busy. This one is ideal, so I'm going to give you the link to download it. Once you've downloaded it, go ahead and open it in Photoshop. Now I've already done that and here is the image. Now, if your image needs any preparation before you begin, now is the time to do it. For this image, I didn't need much preparation except that I thought I could improve the beak a little bit. Given that this is not a photo that we're dealing with so much as a potential painting object. I'm actually going to clone in a bit more orange, yellow here along the beak. It's a little bit less brown, I think that's going to help paint it later on. I'm going to the Clone Stamp Tool here in Photoshop. The Clone Stamp Tool operates by alt clicking on a sample of the area of the image that you want to use this paint, and then painting over the area that you want to remove or hide. Now, you can do this on a new layer symmetrical and add a new layer here, and I'm going to make sure that I have sample set to all layers, and that will allow me to sample all the layers, but only paint on the empty layer here. If I don't like what I've done, I can go and fix it. My brush needs to be a lot smoother than this, let's just go and check the brush I'm using. Well, I've got this hard brush here, so it's going to bring the hardness down to a lot softer, and it needs to be a bit smaller. I can also use the open and close square brackets to size the brush if I need to. I'll alt also option click on the color I want to use, and I'm just going to go and paint over the beak. I'm watching the little plus symbol on my image because that's telling me the area of the image that I'm currently sampling. If I need to, I can sample a different area. Right now all I'm doing is sampling this sort of yellow, orange color, as I go down the beak, I'm just painting it in and making sure that my brush gets smaller as I go. Now, this might not be a really good eagle's beak for a photograph, but it's going to give me a much better result in my final painting. If I make a mistake control alt Z to undo that control options Z on the mark. Another thing I could do here is I could add some yellow color to the eye of the bird here, what I'm going to do for that is I'm actually going to select over the eye so I'm going back to this background layer, I'm just going to select this area of the eye that needs a little bit of extra yellow. Using the quick select tool here, I'm selecting over the eye, I'm going to alt drag over the pupil, so the only area I have selected is this yellow area or what should be a little bit yellower? I can make that a little bit more yellower now by choosing Image Adjustments, Hue Saturation. I'm going to colorize and I'm going to pick up a nice yellow color and an increased saturation, and just make the bird's eye that little bit extra saturated, and I'll click okay. Again, that will help me improve my image as I'm painting it. Now, if I'm happy with the result, I'm just going to press control or command zero to zoom out and just look at the final result. Well, I'm pretty happy with it, so I'm going to merge this layer which is the colored beak layer down into the remainder of the image. I've got a selection visible right now and I'll choose, select or Control or Command D. To merge these two layer, I'll right-click and choose merge down. There's also the case strike that you can use which is Control or Command E. Now, if you need to crop the image you can crop it as well. I'm going to crop it a little bit because I want to show you what's not going to happen if you crop your image and you don't do the next steps. I'm just cropping my image, and what we're going to do with the Art History Brush soon, is we're going to add a new layer to this image and we're going to the Art History Brush, and we'll go to the History Palette, we'll select the original image layer and we'll go and paint. Now, you won't be able to paint and I certainly can't paint because I've cropped the image. So if this happens to you, just be aware that's going to be the case. What we need to do is we need to save and reopen this image. I'm going to step through this with you now and then we're going to go and set up the image again, so we'll do all those steps I did just before. I'm going to choose file and then save. I'm going to save this as a reasonably large file and I'll click okay. I'm going to close this file. Now, I'm going to open it again with file and then open recent, I can go back to my bird eagle image. This is the one that has the fixed beak and the fixed eye in it. But this time because I saved it, closed it and reopened it, the Art History Brush is going to work perfectly fine. Now we're ready to go on without painting.
3. Paint a Photo - Part 2: For our painting, we're going to need a new layer. I'm just going to click on the "New Layer" icon here, to add a new layer to my image. Lets just hide the history palette, and let's go through those steps again. You'll chose Window and then History. The Art History Brush is over here and it shares a toolbar position, with the History Brush tool. But we're the Art History brush here. In the top of the history palette here you'll say that I have bold eagle one which is the image I'm working with. If you are working with another image, you would have that image name there, and the Art History Brush needs to be located here. So you need to click on here, so that you see this little brush icon, and that's telling you that your sampling this layer as your painting. Now we're all set up ready to paint. We just need to go and get a paintbrush. I'm going to open up the brushes palette here, and I can choose any of these brushes, and there are more brushes here still. I can click this little fly-out menu and go and get some other brushes. For example, there are some thick heavy brushes and wet media brushes. Well, let's just go and get the wet media brushes and see how we'd add them. I've clicked on them. I'm going to click "Append". The reason why I want to click "Append" and not "Okay" is I want to keep all layers brushes as well. If I click "Append" these new brushes are just added to the end, so they just added down here. So let's actually go and get one of these brushes. I'm going to choose this one. It's an oil medium brush with wet edges. So that will be a good one for our under painting, but it's a very small. So I'm just going to click away from the brushes palette. I'm going to increase the size of my brush using the close square bracket case. Find the open and close square bracket case are well-worth learning. Now I'm going to start painting on the image and this is an under painting. The purpose of the under painting layer is just to get rid of the photo. Basically you just want to hide the photo, so that later on they won't be any part of the photo visible and so all we're trying to do is to just get some color on the canvas. You'll also say that rather disconcertingly right now, this brush is just painting with a series of same size, same type strokes. So it's sort of not the kind of brush that we're going to want to be using later on with our painting, but for now it'll be just fine. Up here it's important to set your tolerance correctly. I'm using a very low tolerance, which will let me paint over the image and get some really good detail. I suggest you set your tolerance down to a low level, and I've got an area of 50 pixels. You can also choose a type of brush here, I have Tight Short, selected. But for example, I could choose a dab brush and it would just have a slightly different effect. As you are painting later on, you can experiment with different styles of brushes here to see what you like, and each of this styles is going to be a little bit different depending on the actual brushstroke itself that you are using too. So there's plenty of stuff to experiment with here. But we're done with that under painting, it's time to do another layer. I'm going to add another layer. The Art History brushes just going to stay on this layer up here which is perfect. That's all I wanted to do. So I can close down the history panel. But right now I'd like to do something with this brush because it's not a very attractive brush. I'm going to the brushes panel. I'm going to select the brush tip shape here and I'm going to increase the spacing so that the brush is going to paint with separate strokes rather than in a straight line. I want to see this happening here. Then I'm going to Shape Dynamics, and here I can adjust the size Jitter so I can make the brush paint in different size brush strokes. So it's going to paint little and big. I can set a minimum diameter so it won't be really small, but it would be medium small. But I actually want it to be small. The Angle Jitter is going to rotate it so it's going to take on different angles. It's not always going to paint in the same direction if you like, much better. I'm also going to increase the roundness Jitter for that. You'll see that we don't have scattering here, which we would have normally with a brush, but with the Art History Brush, we don't have scattering options. I'm going to close that down and stop painting. Well, you can see that it's really taken off here and it's taken off because I'm using Loose Curl, and I think that's a very good choice here right now. I'm going to go back and I've chosen Dab, and I'm going to start painting here and get down another layer of paint. This paint layer is a little more interesting because the brush is painting in different ways. Once I've got a little bit of color happening here and a break up of the background area here, which I can get as well by dabbing on the back and clicking rather than painting, I can break up some of the solid fill color that we had. It's now time to add another layer. I'm going to click on that layer and I'm going to start shrinking my brush. Every layer from now on, I'm going to shrink my brush. I'm not really happy with how this brush is painting right now. I think I'm just going to bring down, the Angle Jitter a little bit. Probably bring back the size Jitter too and see how that paints. I'll switch to Loose Long or experiment with some brush that's going to paint a little bit differently. I can also choose a different brush here. So I could come in here and choose one of these brushes instead. I will need to set each brush up individually those who need to come back here into Shape Dynamics and just adjust the brush to make it paint the way you want it to paint. I'll come in here and paint with it. Again, it's set to Loose Long so I might go to Loose Medium. But what I'm looking for right now is to start to bring the detail back in this bird, and you can see that with every successive layer, if I shrink the size of the brush, I'm getting more bird detail into the painting. That's really what I'm looking to build up. I don't want the entire painting to be painted with this one brush in this style. I just want to keep building up detail in the areas where detail is important, which is in the bird, not the background as I go. If I'm happy with the layer then I'm going to go and add another layer, shrink the brush a little bit and continue to paint. Every layer will bring a little bit more detail with it. Provided I shrink the brush each time. You don't have to finish any of these layers, you can just work with a little bit of detail on a layer and then just start a new one. I'm going to continue to work on this bird at a couple more layers and work on the detail and we'll come back when the image is pretty near painted. Now I'm pretty happy with the bird at this stage, what you will want to do is to make sure that you have enough detail in the image. But remember, this is a painting, it's not a photo, it's not supposed to look like a photo. It's supposed to be made up of paint strokes, the kind of paint strokes that you might put on canvas. So it's not supposed to be photo-realistic, it's supposed to be painterly. At this point I'm ready to progress to the finishing touches, which we'll do in the next video.
4. Paint a Photo - Part 3: Now if you are a painter, you'll know that when you paint a bird like this, you won't be painting just white over the face. You might be using blues and greens and all sorts of colors to make a more interesting image. At this point we're going to start putting a little bit of color into the image. I'm going to add a brand new layer. I'm going to work with a really small brush. I'm just going to add a few little paint strokes in here. I'm going to do it in areas where I as a painter, might be adding a variety of colors into the painting. But of course, at this stage because I'm painting with the art history brush. I'm only going to be painting colors that are actually in the image underneath, but we're going to change that in just a minute. Let's just have a look at this layer, I'm going to right-click on the layer visibility icon here. I'm going to choose Show, Hide, all other layers because I just want you to see what's on this layer. It's not very much paint at all, it's important that this is only a little bit of paint. Now, I'm going to right click on this again. I'm going to do Show, Hide all other layers, so I want to see all my layers. Now, why that we can add a little bit of color into this layer here is to add a hue adjustment layer to it. I'm just going to click on the top most layer, which has these little bits that I want to do something special with. I'm going to choose Layer, New Adjustment Layer, Hue Saturation, and I'm going to click, Ok. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to drag on this hue slider. As I drag on it, you'll see that different colors come into the image. Well, they coming into the entire image right now. What I'm going to do is click on this icon here, which clips it to the layer underneath to just those areas that I painted on. What I'm going to do is just find something that I like in terms of the hue. I'm not worried about the paintbrush strokes now because I realized the beak is just not a happening thing. I need to get rid of that, but I do see some yellows, and greens, and blues in the bird, which is really interesting to me. I'm just going to go for the bits that I want knowing full well that I can remove the other bits later on. I'm thinking that my sweet point is going to be in these blues and greens. I think that's a nice effect for this image, ignoring what's happening with the beak. Having done that, I can just shut down the hue saturation adjustment layer. Now, the hue saturation adjustment layer comes with a layer mask. If I paint on that, I can remove the color from this area that I don't want the color to be in, but still leave the paint strokes. If I want to get rid of the paint strokes then I'm going to remove them from this layer. You really get a choice. Do you want those paint strokes, but just the regular bird color or do you want to get rid of them entirely? Well, I'm opting for getting rid of them entirely. So I'm going to select this layer which has my colored pixels on it, and I'm going to add a mask to it. I'm going to click here on the Add Layer mask icon. Now, I can paint with black on this layer mask to remove the colored pixels that I don't want. So I'm going to select the regular brush. I'm going to select a circular, nice soft dish, regular brush. I'm going to take its hardness up to around about 20-22 percent. Not rocket science, just choose a value that makes sense to you. Going to increase the brush size. I'm painting with black. I'm making sure that the mask here I select it's got a little box around it, tells me it selected. Now, I'm just going to paint out the color that I don't like. But you know, if I like a little bit of the color, I'm going to leave it in. I've got a little bit of the orange in there, just not all of it. In fact, I think I took too much off the top of the beak. so I'm going back to the white paint. I'm going to shrink my brush size down really, really small. I think I'm going to choose a brush that has a little bit of texture in it. This one here will be probably pretty good. I'm just going to paint a little bit on the birds beak because I want a little bit of the color back in. Let's zoom in here. You can see it a little bit of orange color coming back in. I can just work on that here, added in draw back and painted out using black paint until I've got it looking the way I want it to look. Again, making sure I'm on the mask painting with black paint to remove it. But you'll find that some of this slightly different color will be more attractive in the image. This is the image before we added those little bits of extra color, and this is it afterwards, bird's eye looks much, much better, much, much more painterly.
5. Paint a Photo - Part 4: Now, you could finish your painting at this point or you may want to go ahead and put a texture on it. I'm going to show you how to bring in a texture. I'm going to create a smart object for this painting because I want to apply the texture in a way that we can adjust it. I'm just going to select all the layers that make up the painting. That's everything except the bird image itself. I'm clicking on the topmost layer, Shift click on the bottom most layer. I'll right-click and choose Convert to Smart Object. You can also do that from the filter menu by choosing Convert for Smart Filters. It's exactly the same thing. Now, with this image, layer selected, it actually says hue saturation. I'm just going to call this, painted bird. Just to remove any confusion, this is the paint of bird layer, and everything is on it. Then select this layer and I'm going to filter, Filter Gallery. In the Filter Gallery in this texture area, is a texturize. I'm going to click on Texturizer. I'm just going to click here and Fit in View so I can see the entire bird. Now, there are a number of textures here that you can use. I've chosen Canvas. You can scale it, so you can make it larger or smaller, and you can also adjust the relief to make it more or less. Well, we don't want much relief at all, but we may want it to be larger scale. You can just work around, until you get a good texture for your image and click "Okay" when you're done. Now, if you've painted on Canvas before, you'll know that when you layer a lot of paint onto Canvas, the Canvas texture no longer shows. It'll show where you've got light layers of paint, but not when you've got heavy layers of paint. Let's go on and apply an effect which is going to remove the texture from the very lightest areas of the image. I'm going back to my painted bird, and I'm going to choose, Select, and then Color Range. What I want to do is I want to make a selection of the highlights in this image. From this list, I'm going to select Highlights. These are the highlight areas. Now I can adjust the fuzziness slider, and I can adjust the range. All I want is some area here that I'm going to remove or minimize the texture in. I'm just going to make sure I'm happy with this preview and I'll click "Okay". What we've got now is we've got matching ends and a warning message. Well, I'm just going to click "Cancel" right now, because I don't want to do anything with this. It's going to affect the smart object. What I want to do is I want to take this selection, and I want to use it to mask out the texture. I'm going to click here in the smart filters, Mask. I've got black as my foreground color. I'm going to press Alt Backspace, Option Delete. That will fill the mask here with the selection of the highlights in the image. I can just choose, Select, Deselect, let's Control or Command D. Now if we zoom into the image in this area, you'll see that the texture has been totally removed from the highlight areas, but it still appears in the areas that are not highlights. We've got more of a painterly feel, if you like here. Now, if I think that there is total little texture in this white, if the black is too intense, I can lighten it. I'm going to double-click on this mask and that will open the masks panel. I'm just going to reduce the density of the mask. If I make the mask a little bit less dense, it's going to be a little bit lighter gray. We're going to see some texture through it, just not the intense texture that we have in the other areas of the image. I brought that down to about 80 percent. Let's zoom back out with Control or Command 0. This is our finished painted bird. This is the original image. We cropped it slightly and I also recolored the beak so I would get a better beak in my final painting. This is the painted version. It's texturize as well. Your project for this class is going to be to create your own painting from a digital photo. You can download and use this bird and I'll give you the link to do so in the project instructions. Or you can choose any image of your choice. Go ahead and clean up the image if it needs any changes, save it, and reopen it, and then go and do your underpainting and then your layers of paint. Finish off with that slightly altered color layer, and also the texturized layer. When you finish, post your project in the class project area. I hope that you've enjoyed this course and that you've learned something about creating digital paintings in Photoshop from photos. If you did enjoy this course and if you see a prompt to recommend this class to others, please give it a thumbs up. This helps other people to identify this as a class that they may want to take. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and I look at all of your class projects. My name is Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
