One of my most-watched videos every day on this channel is my
tutorial showing how to create a watercolour effect in Photoshop.
That tutorial uses a combination of Photoshop
filters to transform an image with a painterly appearance.
Since the addition of the Generative Fill tool to Photoshop, there's a
whole new way of creating a realistic watercolour effect with the help of AI.
Open your chosen image in Adobe Photoshop. I'm using this free
photo of a wooden boat on a blue lake by Pietro De Grandi from Unsplash.com.
If you make a selection with the Select All command, then use the Generative Fill toolbar
to enter the AI prompt 'Watercolour Painting', it doesn't quite have the intended result.
It has generated a watercolour painting but it has
retained absolutely nothing from the original image.
There is a way to force Photoshop to use the existing imagery as a reference though,
and that's by altering the opacity of the selection.
You can do that with a Quick Mask selection,
activate this little icon, or hit the Q key as a shortcut.
Quick mask mode is identified by the red highlight on the layer.
Set up the colour picker with a 50% grey by entering 50 in the B field of
the HSB or Hue, Saturation and Brightness values.
Use the ALT+Backspace shortcut to fill this quick mask with grey.
Exit out of quick mask mode, then enter the watercolour painting generative fill prompt again.
This time because of the 50% grey selection,
the AI Generative Fill will produce a watercolour effect,
but combine it 50/50 with the original image, which results in a much closer interpretation.
Of course with AI the quality of the results is all down to luck, especially when you're trying
to record the process for a YouTube video, but you can always regenerate new results.
This version has some nice watercolour texturing, but the main subject has been
lost within the large paint daubs. This is where that quick mask method really comes in handy.
Turn off the visibility of this generative fill layer, then enter quick mask mode again.
Set up the colour picker, this time with 25% brightness. This
will essentially create a selection with a 25% opacity, meaning the watercolour
effect will be applied to 25% of the image while retaining 75% of the original image.
Exit out of quick mask mode and re-enter the same watercolour painting prompt.
These results retain much more detail while still having a
painterly watercolour effect. In some cases you could just go straight for a
25-30% selection if your image doesn't have any intricate details you need to preserve.
Turn off this new layer and set up the quick mask again, this time use just 5 in the brightness.
Exit out of quick mask mode and re-enter the same watercolour painting prompt again.
These results will retain 95% of the original image,
so it preserves the fine details of the people in the boat.
The trees and mountains in the background are probably a little too detailed though,
but what we can do since we made three different versions with varying levels
of detail, is use layer masks to blend them all together.
Turn on the visibility of those other layers.
Activate the layer mask of the top layer and select the brush tool.
To allow the masking to blend seamlessly,
use a set of watercolour brushes so the texturing perfectly matches the visual style of the effect.
Follow the link in the description to pick up this pack of Watercolour Blooms brushes. For
just $15 you get 150 high resolution stamp brushes made from real paint.
Choose one of the watercolour brushes,
then in the Brush Settings under the Shape Dynamics options, max out the Angle Jitter.
Every time you click to stamp with the brush, it will randomly rotate to eliminate any repetition.
Dab around the canvas to erase portions of this most detailed layer to allow the
moderately detailed layer below to show through.
Don't worry if you erase too much, since we're painting within a layer
mask we can easily restore the artwork by swapping the brush from black to white.
Select the layer mask of the next layer and erase portions of this
layer too. This time keep to the edges of the canvas.
If you do want to restore some areas of the other layers, just switch the foreground
and background colour pickers around to paint with white within the layer mask.
As a finishing touch, add a paper texture to further
enhance the realism. This collection of Watercolor Paper Textures can be
downloaded from the Envato Elements library. Link in the description.
Open your texture in Photoshop, use the shortcuts CMA+A to Select A,
CMD+C to Copy, CMD+W to Close and return to the main document,
then CMD+V to paste. Use CMD+T if necessary to Transform and scale the texture to size.
Set the blending mode to Multiply to allow the artwork to show through, leaving the tiny details
of the paper texture as if this AI generated digital art was a real watercolour painting.