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!

Adobe CS3.3 Released

Adobe CS 3.3 Released

The Adobe Creative Suite 3.3 upgrade hit my doorstop this past week. (I talked about CS3 in an earlier post). The only thing the CS3.3 Design Standard upgrade offers, really, is an upgrade from Acrobat 8 to Acrobat 9. I'm not sure yet what Acrobat 9 is all about, but from my brief reading/skimming I've come to the understanding that it beefs up forms and multimedia support. Yay.

Now, if you're a Creative Suite 3 Design Premium user, there's a lot more to like about this upgrade: you get a full license for Fireworks. Now that's a little more like it, Adobe! When it comes to designing graphics for the Web, Firworks is good, good stuff and it's nice they finally threw us a bone.

I was a little wary of the upgrade - the original 3.0 install came on DVDs and was many gigs in size. And the post-install updating routine was a disaster.

Fortunately, although the new installer also comes on DVD, it does nothing but install Acrobat. No other components are updated or reinstalled. Whew! All you have to do is follow the instructions for removing older versions of Acrobat, and then drag the Acrobat 9 folder to your computer. In this case, it's pretty easy - the Acobat 8 folder created during the CS3 install contains an uninstaller program. Inexplicably, the Acrobat 9 folder you drag over from your installation DVD to your hard drive is over a gig.