Sometimes we take pictures and when we print them out we simply say, “Wow, that could almost be a painting!” Many people are not aware that there are software programs that contain techniques that you can use to alter your photos into a watercolor or pen and ink painting or charcoal drawing. Once you have changed your photo you then can print it out onto canvas or fine art watercolor paper for that true art feel and permanence.
Photography today is bridging the gap between “fine art photography” and simply “fine art”. What takes a painter days, weeks and months to create a painting masterpiece, a photograph can be transformed into a watercolor, a pen and ink drawing and even a charcoal drawing in a few hours. And many if these techniques can be applied to the same image. It all depends on how you want to “interpret” your art work.
Adobe PhotoShop Elements offers many wonderful filter tools and it simply requires a little bit of time and experimentation to learn how to use some of these to enhance your photographs. Adding a little “noise” or Gaussian Blur” to an image can do wonders to transform a photo.
As you practice you will become familiar with many of the filter tools available and you will soon figure out that you will want to apply different tools to certain parts of your image. A simple way to do this is to select an area of your picture that you want to apply an effect to and “cut it” from the main photo and copy it into a new folder. When you have done this you can then work on each part of your image independently. Finally, once you have finished adding your effects to the part you had cut away you can simply copy it back into the original image and relocate it to the proper position. It will literally “snap” into place when you line it up with where it needs to be.
Photoshop Elements has some wonderful “Effects” tools and experiment with some of these to see what they can do with your image. Ahhh, and when you have created some masterpieces, try converting them into black and white or select portions of your image as black and white while other portions remain in color. You will get a “painted effect” on the color portion.
Using these filters literally alters the pixels in the image. By doing this you are then able to make the image far larger without the loss of resolution that you would experience with a normal photo when printing. For example, we have applied some techniques to an image taken on an 8 megapixel digital camera and have then printed that image at 30 x 40 inches on canvas and it is stunning…and it can easily go larger.
