You can create oil painting photos by using Art History Brush in Adobe Photoshop. It may be a little bit difficult for you at the first time following this method. After you feel familiar with it, you can modify or change the steps to create unlimited styles of oil painting photos. Let’s see before and after digital darkroom process.
1. Copy background layer. You drag your “Background” layer over the new layer icon in order to duplicate “Background” Layer. You will get “Background copy” layer over the “Background” layer.
2. Change the mode of “Background copy” layer from normal to overlay in order to increase contrast of overall photo.
3. Flatten image.
4. Create new layer by just simply click a creating new layer from the layer pallet (see the photo below). You will get “Layer1” over “Background” layer.
5. Select foreground from the tool pallet. For this step, you can pick any color as foreground because it will used as a guideline for painting so I pick yellow.
6. Press Alt+Del in order to fill foreground into the Layer1 and change its opacity to 50%.
7. This step is very important. Select “Art History Brush” from the tool pallet. Then go to History Pallet and select the step called Flatten Image. The reason why we need to assign our “Art History Brush” to “Flatten Image” because the history brush will use the photo from the history, “Flatten Image” in this case, to create texture.
8. Adjust brush parameters as follows: Size 30 px, Opacity 100%, Style: Tight Short, Area 20 px, Tolerance 0%. Then paint into “Layer1” painted with yellow. I paint only the face area because I select small brush size.
Note: The brush size is adjustable and the parameter in this step is just only guide line.
9. Adjust brush parameters as follows: Size 100 px, Opacity 100%, Style: Tight Curl, Area 20 px, Tolerance 5%. Then paint into “Layer1”. I paint only the body area because I select bigger brush size than step 8.
10. Adjust brush parameters as follows: Size 200 px, Opacity 100%, Style: Tight Curl, Area 20 px, Tolerance 5%. I select bigger brush size than step#9. I paint only the background area because I select bigger brush size than step 9.
11. This step is optional. After applying big brush size (step#10), you can see that some details on the singer face and hair are lost due to bigger painting over them. You can fix this problem easily. The basic idea is to use small brush size to paint over the damaged areas. Adjust brush parameters as follows: Size 20 px, Opacity 100%, Style: Tight Curl, Area 20 px, Tolerance 5% then paint over the areas where the details are destroyed such as hair, face and microphone area.
12. Duplicate “Background” layer by just simply dragging “Background” layer over the new layer icon.
13. Apply “Find Edge” filter: Filter>Stylize>Find Edge
14. Desaturate this layer: Image>Adjustments>Desaturate
15. Move this layer to the top. Change mode from Normal to Multiply and reduce opacity to 60%. After completion of this step, you will see that your photo has pencil line created around.
16. Select “Eraser Tool” from the tool pallet in order to delete some rough edge areas.
17. Change the eraser style. I select the style that looks like sand painting.
18. Delete some rough edge areas. For this case, I use the eraser tool to delete some areas of her hair, nose, hand, etc.
19. Moreover, you can increase facial detail of this singer. Select Layer1, select eraser for this case I still use the eraser style as same as step#16 but I reduce size of eraser to 20 px and opacity to 20%. More opacity you select, you facial detail will show.
20. Apply eraser tool over her face so that some facial details are recovered.
You may see that there are a lot of steps but some steps can be skipped depending on you. Let’s try and have fun with it.
