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Turning Photos Into Art—02/15/10

Painting photos with the Art History Brush

This Article Features Photo Zoom

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I’m always looking for fun and easy ways to make photographs look like paintings, and I recently learned another great one. Photoshop’s Art History Brush is a variant of the History Brush, with which the previous action (from Photoshop’s history palette) is painted away. The Art History Brush adds a twist to the recreation of this history by adding artful effects as the previous history state is returned to the photo. These brushstrokes can quite effectively be used to create the look of an impressionist painting. Here’s how.

— Start with an image that doesn’t rely too much on fine detail—a landscape or a close-up is often an ideal choice. Select the image (Ctrl/Command A) and copy it (Ctrl/Command C) onto a new layer.

—With the original image duplicated onto a new layer, select all again and delete it, creating a now-blank layer. Why not just create the blank layer in the first place? Because for the Art History Brush to work, we need to provide it with a “history” to repaint—in this case, the duplicate of the original image on a new layer.

—With the layer now blank, select the Art History brush and choose a relatively large brush diameter, maybe 300 or 500 pixels depending on the size of your image, and a Tight Curl or Tight Short brush style. Then repaint the image across the entire layer. The key for this first layer’s succes is to choose a relatively large and undetailed brush. This will form the background texture of the image, where detail isn’t needed. As we add layers to the photo, we’ll impart more and more detail.

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— For the second layer, again paste the background image onto a new layer and delete it. Choose a smaller brush size—I like to be sure it’s at least half the size of the previous brush—and perhaps a tighter brush style. Again paint with the Art History brush to add more detail and texture to the image.

Step 4

—Continue by repeating the paste>clear>repaint procedure, each time shrinking the brush size at least by half. As you get to more and more detailed layers, you may want to consider changing the brush style to Dab, which creates an almost pointillist painting approach. I think it works well for maintaining an impressionist style, but it provides enough detail that the image becomes more recognizable.

— The final step is to paste a final layer to be used for only the finest edge details of the scene. Do this by pasting the original image on the top layer, and applying a High Pass filter to show only the most important edge details. Then set the layer mode to Overlay, and you’ll see those original edges—at this point, almost looking like an etching—laid over the painted layers. These edges are key for keeping the photograph from becoming too abstract. This balance between abstraction and detail is largely controlled by adjusting the top layer’s opacity. I like to use as little of the edge detail as necessary to make the image recognizable. Flatten the image and resave the file, and you’ve turned your photograph into a high-tech impressionist painting.

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