1. Learn more photo manipulation
2. Learn more about Photoshop

Janee has a way of giving lots of very useful tips about little things in Photoshop along with the discipline of making images a certain file size and dimension!

All the image thumbnails below will open to a new, larger image, each in its own window. Be sure to close them after viewing.

Week 5, Creating a real digital painting from a photo. Amazing to see the results of painting with a hard and soft round brush of varying sizes and opacities.

The Paintings

1. The banana painting is the more realistic of the two. It was also the easier! In each painting, I followed the steps of creating the 'tracing' paper. The pen tool was used to create the outlines of the objects. The banana was a very simple one section drawing/tracing which I outlined and filled using the Paths palette. I then worked with both a hard and soft round brush changing color, opacity and size( along with hardness and softness).. I was, and still am, amazed with the realism achieved with this method.
2. The tulip was far more difficult and less real in appearance. I think that I was trying to finish as quickly as possible and so less perfection. However, I am not unhappy because it has a more 'painted' look!

In doing the paintings, I did use the Dodge, Burn, Smudge Tools. I also used some blending modes. The tulip painting must have ended up with about 30 layers. Making the little veiny lines on the tulip petals did become tedious. I created a brush of a set of 1 pixel strokes, and captured as a brush. I tried that on some of the petals but was not totally happy with the result and so was back at drawing them one by one.

As I worked at these I was impressed with the painting capabilities of Photoshop. However, having used Painter for many years (now have Painter IX), I realized how much easier it is to get a brush, change its parameters and have it available as a custom brush throughout the painting. Also, to be able to mix colors on a mixing palette and then set bristles to pick up and blend and spread, etc. make Painter my choice for doing paintings.

I love Photoshop for what it does well and Painter for what it does well!