Hi I’m Painter Master Elite Karen Bonaker and I’m very excited to show you how fun and easy it is to
apply creative photo effects to your cherished photographs with the new painter essentials 6.
The goal in this lesson is to create painterly images and to minimize any photographic reference.
So let’s get started!
Let’s begin by getting familiar with the interface and how very simple it is to really move around and stay organized as your painting.
There’s very little distractions in the essentials works space and this contributes to being able to have lots of fun with your creativity and not be bothered by all the many palettes going on around you.
So let’s take a look at what we’re going to be working with today.
We have the floating color palette here which is a nice option because we can just simply drag it over certain areas and get a nice color matching if we need to.
So we’ll use this quite often as we work.
Today we’re going to be working with the photo painting panel and this is open.
When you open your interface up, this will automatically open for you.
However, you can open any of these panels by simply going to the window menu and taking a look at the different command options that are available to you here.
The color palette, the mixer, color sets, navigator, photo painting which is command 6 or Ctrl 6 and the layers panel.
Any of these can be open and close by simply unchecking the option.
You’ll notice that I also have my navigator open and I tend to keep my navigator open when I’m working because I like to use it as a second reference.
It helps me establish my focal area more clearly and to see my values from light to dark.
Today we’re going to be painting this lovely portrait of Quinn and I think this one that really came together nicely I tend to like to work with lots of texture.
And so the chalk brushes came in handy in establishing some of that extra texture and we’ll go into that when we begin.
So, in my interface here I have the photo painting panel open.
And that is about it. So let’s go ahead and start and open up our image and go through the steps.
To begin with I’ve opened my reference image.
To do that you’ll simply want to go to file, open, locate the image in your file structure and open it.
And before we actually do this, what we like to do is correct any colors, any changes we need to make to the image.
So we want to first of all take a look at the size of the image so we’ll go to canvas and resize and we’ll take a look at the size of this particular image.
This is a good size image to work with its 1500x2000 at a 150ppi.
So this will be a nice size to work with so there’s no changes that we need to make to the size of the image.
Next, we’re going to go ahead and on the menu bar, we’ll look at this option called effects.
We’ll open the effects, and we’re going to go down to something called tonal control and we’re going to select the option “adjust colors”.
Now when it opens up you’re going to notice that it change the colors quite a bit and this may not necessarily be what you want to work with.
So instead we’ll go ahead and select the reset option and that brings that color back to the traditional or the original color that the image was.
And from that point on, we’re going to work with two sliders with one called the saturation and the other one called value.
In the particular brush category I’m going to be working with, I like to have a little extra color coming through as I begin the auto painting or the photo painting option here.
So with the saturation slider I’m going to actually take the saturation up a little bit higher.
And what that does is that it pops all those colors out nicely and creates a nice color scheme that we can work with.
I’ll also take a look at the value and if I need to bring the values up a little bit, I can lighten the overall image or I can bring the value down or to the left and that would darken those values.
But I think that this is about right, this is a good value, good representation of values and I’m going to simply go ahead and select “okay”.
Now we’re going to take a look at the photo painting panel here now that our image is ready to go and we have it set up in terms of size and color.
And we’re going to notice that on this photo painting panel we have a couple of options.
We can browse for the image that we want to use for our reference or we can use the open image option which is the image that you see here or the image that is located on the canvas — it’s the open image.
So we can simply get started by using that open image.
We’ll come down to step number two which when we go ahead and open the fly out, it gives a several options that we can choose from — from detailed painting all the way down to pastel drawing.
And what we’re going to start off with first is we’re going to choose this option here called pen and ink drawing.
And I’m going to go ahead and select that.
I’m going to then come over, first of all we’re going to begin by using used the open image.
So we’ll go ahead and select that image and if you want to change or save those changes that you’ve made to this image, then you can simply go ahead and select yes for changes or if you don’t want to save those changes then just select no.
But in this case I’m going to select yes and we’ll go ahead and save that image.
And you can see now that when we go back to taking a look at our photo painting, you can see that the reference image is now embedded in the photo painting panel, and we can start by using that particular image.
The next step is to go ahead and go over to your layers palette and we’re going to go ahead and add a new layer.
Once we’ve added that new layer, this is the layer that we’re going to start our painting on.
And we’re coming back to the number two which is the auto painting option and we’re going to go ahead and start that option by selecting the start option here and it’s going to go ahead and start filling that in.
And you can see that it isn’t quite as dark as I would like it to be so I’m going to go ahead and select that start option one more time and let it play out one more time.
And you can see that texture coming through is something that really looks great here and I really like what’s happening on this image.
So I’m going to retain that and keep that nice sketch available.
I’m going to now lock that layer because I don’t want to paint on that layer.
The lock option is located on the layers panel and I’ll go ahead and select that by clicking on the lock and you can see that that is now locking that layer.
We’ll go ahead and go back to our canvas layer and then select new layer again.
And this is a layer were going to be doing our painting on.
What I’ve chosen to do for the color or the painting part of this, is to use the option called illustration.
And I love the effect that comes out on this, gives a great look and we’re just going to go ahead and get started with the illustration option.
So to do that we simply select the start option and we’re going to let that go ahead and fill in our painting.
And the real lovely thing that I enjoy about this is the fact that we still retain that lovely sketch above on the layer above and then we have our painted image on the layer 2.
And the sketch will be maintained and at this point we can go and start doing some fine tuning to our painting of Quinn.
The next step we’re going to do is we’re going to move in to some of this brushes and talk about how we can create some fine edges and bring back some of the detail specifically to the painting.
When we examine the photo painting option a little closer, we’ll notice that when we started painting with the auto painting option here, that this option called “clone color from source image” was selected.
And what that means is that it’s picking up the colors from the original source image and applying them to your painting.
We do have the option now to go ahead and take a look at this brush here called the soft cloner and it is located in the photo painting brushes under soft cloner.
And what I want to do here is on layer 2 is I want to come around very gently on the edges here and just clean up these edges around her lips and chin and shoulder.
Now it’s important that… the soft cloner is one of my favorite brushes because it doesn’t go, it doesn’t bring back photographic reference.
It keeps everything looking very soft, very painterly and that’s you know that kind of the quality that you want to achieve here.
So you want to take your time and go through if you’re working on a portrait whether if it’s a pet portrait, or a child or an adult and take a look at your edges and just determine where it makes sense to soften some of the edges and bring back some of that detail and this is the brush to do that.
So anywhere where you think things have gotten maybe a little distorted, you don’t like the heavy texture of the edge, you want it to appear a little softer — this is where this brush would come in to play.
Once you’ve done that the next step here is where I would move in to is doing a little of my own painting.
So what I’m going to do here is to go back up to the brushes and all your brushes are located in this wonderful library where you can choose any brush that you want to work with.
In this case, I’m gonna work with the chalk, pastels and crayons and I’m going to choose a brush called the square chalk.
Now this brush that we’re going to go back to our photo painting panel and take a look at a couple of things here.
If I wanted to, as I start to paint into this portrait, I could work with the clone color from the source image or I could uncheck this and work with my own colors.
Right now though, I’m going to select clone color and I’m not going to necessarily do anything else on the property bar of the brush but I’m going to start by going into the painting and taking out and working into some of this areas where I see some heavy photo painting pixilation is what I call it.
Anywhere where you’ve got a lot of this kind of digital coming through.
And what I’m doing here is just softly going through here with this chalk brush and just taking some of that out.
We’re really working through those areas to soften some of those lines.
And what we get here is we still retain this beautiful painterly quality but we get out some of these heavily auto painted areas that I find just a little bit distracting and can all of the sudden make a painting look very digital when you want it to look more painterly.
So we’ll take few minutes to go through and take those areas out.
Now it’s been a few minutes going through this painting and taking those areas out that I mentioned that I felt were little distracting and you can see now that those lines are nicely blended out and that was simply by using this square chalk brush.
The final step that I’d like to do here is I like to work with my own color choices.
So what I would do here is take off the clone color option, use the sample tool here, and sample color, and then using my little color palette here I can choose different colors that, you know, lighter colors, you know, maybe I want to add some highlights and work in some of my own color choices to the painting.
One of the nice and new features of painter essentials 6 is being able to work with a bit of paper texture.
So you’ll notice here that I have the sandy pastel paper selected.
And the grain setting is a nice feature because we can control how much of that paper texture comes through when we’re working.
Now I’m going to take clone color off and I’m going to use a nice light color here.
Pick a real heavy texture so you can see what happens here and you’ll notice that paper textures coming through in this particular area.
So the higher I set it the less grain I’m going to get and the lower I set it the more grain is going to be revealed.
So this is a nice new option that you can enjoy working with.
So here I can add maybe a little bit of texture and just add those nice little painterly assets to the painting.
To finish this off, one of the wonderful things that you can do in painter essentials is to apply what we call an overlay and a lot of times overlays can be anything from another image to a texture, to a paper texture.
And in this case what I’ve done here is I’ve applied a watercolor paper texture which is just a jpeg image over the top of this particular portrait to give added texture — more traditional looking interface canvas to work with.
To do this, you’ll go to file and option place.
And if you have a paper texture in your files you can simply place that and then resize it so it covers your entire canvas and the finally you would set that paper texture to multiply blend mode.
And then you’ll notice that everything below this particular layer is visible and it adds that implied texture.
And I’m going to zoom in here a little bit so you can actually see this.
I’ll close the visibility option and then open it again and you can see how that lovely watercolor paper is kind of coming through and it gives that final look to the painting.
So I hope you’ve enjoyed this technique.
I think from going through these steps there’s no end to the additional brushes that you can add, the effects that you can control.
The look of the grasses that I’ve added here was done with default brushes in the new particle brush category and the brush that we used here is called the flow fur brush.
And that brush when used in just a right left or left to right motion, can create this look of this really fine grasses.
So I hope you’ve enjoyed this tutorial and as you go on to have a lot of fun with painter essentials 6. Take care.