Use Photoshop to convert ordinary photos to oil paintings!

[Scaredgirl]

Use Photoshop to convert ordinary photos to oil paintings!

First of all, this is not magic. You cannot just take any crappy photo and change it to an awesome piece of art. The quality of the results depend heavily on the photo you are using. Secondly, this does not replace human artists. Not even close. But it can be used by non-artistic people to quickly produce art that kind of looks like it might have been done by hand. I also understand that this filter does not produce art that is ready to be added in Elements, but it could make finding art for your card idea easier.

Here is an example of what the filter does.

BEFORE


AFTER


How to Achieve This Effect

1. Download and install Adobe Pixel Bender Plug-In for Adobe Photoshop CS5 (http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/pixelbenderplugin.html)
2. Open Photoshop
3. Go to http://www.sxc.hu/ and find a photo you want to transform. You can use these images for free in card ideas or other projects.
4. Apply the filter from Filter > Pixel Bender > Pixel Bender Gallery
5. Choose OilPaint from the drop-down menu and tweak the settings to your liking. In the first photo I used the following settings:



First setting is the most important one because it determines the level of effect. I recommend you try to get it as high as possible without making the photo too blurry and smudged.

Here's some more examples. I'll add some weapons etc. later after I've experimented with this some more.





Same filter with 50% Watercolor effect
I tested some other effects to make it more like an illustration. Watercolor effect helped a bit, although it's still not like the real thing.



I made a quick random card idea that uses the image.



Like I said earlier, these images do not fit in Elements because they are too realistic, but they should be pretty good placeholder images for people who need art for their card ideas.

If anyone has ideas on how to improve these images, please let us know. Thanks.


That's it.

[PlayerOa]

It looks gorgeous - too bad I don't have Photoshop.

[Scaredgirl]

It looks gorgeous - too bad I don't have Photoshop.

Yep, that is one major problem with this method.

[ddevans96]

Off-topic: There are a few different vectorization sites out there, if you want an alternative to photoshop. I've used http://vectormagic.com/home to make photos look life less real-life-y. Two of my cards have art made this way (though the latter has heavy editing well)

On-topic: These look really good combined with the watercolor effect though - props to anyone who can devise a similar method with GIMP

[EmeraldTiger]

I use PSE9 and it don't have that filter.

[Scaredgirl]

Off-topic: There are a few different vectorization sites out there, if you want an alternative to photoshop. I've used http://vectormagic.com/home to make photos look life less real-life-y. Two of my cards have art made this way (though the latter has heavy editing well)

Yes, that's the tool I used in this old topic (http://elementscommunity.org/forum/index.php/topic,6259.0.html). It's a good free alternative to what Adobe Illustrator can do, but I currently prefer this Pixel Bender Plug-In because it does things like hair much better.

I use PSE9 and it don't have that filter.

It's only for CS5+ unfortunately.

[Danceman]

would be interesting to do this with GIMP. Anyone know how too?

[Scaredgirl]

would be interesting to do this with GIMP. Anyone know how too?

I had a quick look and this was the best I could find: http://www.gimpusers.com/tutorials/oilpainting-from-photo.html . Doesn't look very good, but at least it tries to go for the oil painting look.

You need to go rob someone and buy Photoshop.

[Danceman]

thx.

I also found this, not as cool as above. Maybe someone knows how to do it better.

http://docs.gimp.org/en/plug-in-oilify.html

heres a video:

[Xenocidius]

It's a shame that it's not available for CS4. I went and downloaded the Pixel-Bender plugin for CS4, but it doesn't seem to have OilPaint.

Looks extremely awesome, though. It should be a great help to those people who can't create art but for some reason have Photoshop CS5 anyway.

[NikaZaslavsky]

It should be a great help to those people who can't create art but for some reason have Photoshop CS5 anyway.

Like me! This is cool.

[TheManuz]

It's a shame that it's not available for CS4. I went and downloaded the Pixel-Bender plugin for CS4, but it doesn't seem to have OilPaint.

Looks extremely awesome, though. It should be a great help to those people who can't create art but for some reason have Photoshop CS5 anyway.

Actually, i've found THERE IS pixelbender for CS4.
This (http://www.adobe.com/devnet/pixelbender.html) is the page. Look almost to the bottom, there is an Archived downloads section.
Those are direct links (don't worry, they're real and they're pointing at Adobe):
Pixel Bender plug-in for Photoshop CS4 (Mac/Win 32-bit) (http://download.macromedia.com/pub/developer/pixelbender/pbplugin_ps32b_111708.mxp)
Pixel Bender plug-in for Photoshop CS4 (Win 64-bit) (http://download.macromedia.com/pub/developer/pixelbender/pbplugin_ps64b_111708.mxp)

Also, thanks to ScaredGirl for this discovery!

EDIT: Ops! It seems i read it wrong...  well, anyway those are the links!