Here’s a close-up view of the final result, complete with the Layers panel.Īlthough it may be a little tough to see the detail in this painting in this screenshot, you’ll appreciate it more fully when you give it a whirl on your own photos. When you’re finished, save the document in Photoshop format to retain your layers. This masking trick is especially helpful when you turn a portrait into a painting and you want to bring back some of the photo’s detail in the eyes and mouth area. In the Options bar, adjust the brush’s Opacity setting according to how much of the effect you want to hide and then brush across that area in the photo. To do that, click to activate the mask, activate the Brush tool, and set your foreground color chip to black (when dealing with masks, painting with black conceals and white reveals). If you’d like, you can reduce the painterly effect in certain parts of the image using the filter mask: the big white thumbnail in the Layers panel. Click OK and Photoshop turns the entire document gray-don’t panic, you’ll fix that next. Set Angle to around –130, Height to 3, and Amount to 100 percent. (If the Oil Paint filter is dimmed in your Filter menu, choose Photoshop > Preferences > Performance and turn on Use Graphics Processor.) Leave Lighting turned off and then click OK.
Next, choose Filter > Stylize > Oil Paint and adjust the sliders in the Brush section to your liking (settings of 6.3, 10, 10, and 10 were used here). Choose Filter > Noise > Median, enter a Radius of 3 into the resulting dialog and then click OK. The first filter in this technique roughs up the photo a little so the end result doesn’t look unnaturally perfect. Alternatively, repopulate the Filter menu by choosing Photoshop CC > Preferences > Plug-Ins and turning on “Show all Filter Gallery groups and names.” The benefit of this route is that the individual filter names show up in your Layers panel, instead of a generic entry named Filter Gallery. If you don’t see the categories mentioned below in your own Filter menu, you can access them by choosing Filter > Filter Gallery instead. This technique employs several filters however, Adobe shortened Photoshop’s Filter menu a few versions back, so you may be viewing an abbreviated list in your copy of the program.
Using a Smart Object lets you run filters non-destructively, plus you can reopen the filter’s settings to adjust them.