Oil painting in Photoshop, is it possible to get that oil brush work in a flat image? I was messing with Photoshop yesterday trying to make a photo look like a Rembrandt painting.
A Rembrandt, yeah right, shut up, that's never going to happen.
Okay aim lower, how about a hand-painted art effect? inspired by the color palette of Rembrandt. He used a technique called chiaroscuro. It's an Italian word that basically means that you use dark shadows with bright light. The theory is the contrast gives a painting an intense depth that draws the eye into the painting.
No Photoshop filters required.
I don't use many Adobe PS filters, turns out most are total crap. Try the art effects, they are shockingly bad, nothing like what I would expect anyway.
Rant over, I'm using PS CS5 to get this oil painting effect, but it's so simple you could do it with any version.
You don't need any fancy filters (apart from sharpen), no graphics tablet, and, to be honest, very little skill to achieve nice results from your photo.
I'm sure there are third-party filters that would get you close to this oil painting effect but I'm not using them here.
Oil Painting in Photoshop
First off you need a good photo, the higher the resolution the better. This won't work so well with a tiny 72dpi image, so get a good high-res photo to start with. It's also best if you have your subject in the middle of the frame, looking at the camera. You could do this oil painting with any subject matter, but for this tutorial, we'll keep it simple.
Before Photoshop
After the Oil Painting Effect
Get Me to Do the Oil Painting for You
If you don't have time to do your own oil painting in Photoshop then you can hire me to do it for you. I now offer this as a service, but be warned it's not cheap. It can take well over 5 hours of work to create the oil painting effect.
I've proved that it's not that difficult but it does take time. Cost depends on your picture, the more complex, the more it costs.
If you are interested you'll need:
- A high-resolution photograph (nothing shot on your mobile phone)
- A well-lit photograph
- A head and shoulder shot
Feel free to contact me to talk about your project.