Watercolors without the mess

I’m a photographer, not a painter. But I’ve always been intrigued by Photoshop techniques that can give photos new life – make them look like paintings, charcoal sketches, line drawings, etc.

I never really like the default effects in PS, and I sorta kinda know how to achieve some of these effects manually. But it can be a long, arduous process.

Enter Topaz Simplify and Topaz Adjust, two awesome plug-ins for Photoshop CS3 or CS4. After just half an hour or so of experimentation, I used these plug-ins to create new pieces of artwork from some photos in my collection. Here’s an example of a “painterly” look applied to an otherwise nondescript photo of my friend’s cat:

Before:

After:

Simply and Adjust both let you work on a layer, making tweaks and adjustments to suit your taste, and save those sets of adjustments as pre-sets. Handy for applying the same treatment to a group of photos. You still have to know some image manipulation stuff to begin with, if you want to do anything more than the pre-fabbed default presets. But with a little time and experimentation, you can get some really cool looks. Here’s a heavily-manipulated version of a photo of a church I took in Lancaster last summer:

 

You can take these two plug-ins for a 30-day test-drive by downloading them from Topaz Labs. Have fun!