Here's looking at you, kid: you can do layer masks!

I’ll admit it: I used to be afraid of layer masks. Totally intimidated. I had just begun to use layers, which was a big hurdle for me. I was not about to tackle layer masks, too. No sir. For one thing, I couldn’t see what purpose they served.

You know what I’m going to say next, though, don’t you? (The title of the post gave it away.) Friends and neighbors, I’m here to tell you layer masks are a good thing. You will learn to love layer masks, trust me. They save you time, they give you unlimited flexibility, they allow to edit non-destructively…with layer masks, you are in control. So put down the eraser tool for a second, and let me show you how useful layer masks can be.

We’ll start with something you’ve worked on many times in Photoshop, I’m sure: an eye. Specifically, the white of the eye, known as the sclera. If you’re retouching a portrait, you’ll no doubt spend some time whitening the eyes in some way. For a formal photographic portrait, you may just dodge a few blood vessels, clean things up a bit. But if you’re getting the portrait ready to be brought into Painter, or you’re doing a more painterly retouch job in Photoshop, you’ll probably use some white paint and an airbrush. This is a fantastic time to use a layer mask, as you’ll see.

By the way: this is not the only way to do this task. As in all things with Photoshop, there’s many ways to do most things. But I learned this method from a wonderful training DVD by Jane Conner-Ziser, and I use it all the time. I’ll give you a link to her training materials at the end.

Here's the eye we're going to work on.

Adding white to the eye above is possibly overkill, but for our tutorial, it will work just fine. First, insert a new, empty layer above the background image of the eye. (Go Layer > New > Layer or click the new layer icon in the layers palette. Rename this layer “Whites”. Click on the brush tool (B on the keyboard) and make sure it is turned to very soft (hardness of 0). This is our airbrush. Hold the cursor/brush tip over the eye, and enlarge the size until it’s bigger than the iris. Set the Opacity and Flow both to 100. You’re going to brush in two big puffs of white, one on each side of they iris at the bottom of the eye. The spray will be bright white at the bottom of the eye, and fade just a bit as it reaches the eyelashes. See below. Make sure you’re doing this on the empty layer you added.

Make two big puffs of white, one on either side of the bottom of the iris, as shown here. It's going to look messy.

Next we’ll add a layer mask. With the Whites layer active, click on the layer mask icon (see below), or go Layer > Layer Mask > Reveal All.

Click on the layer mask icon (circled) and you'll get a (you guessed it) layer mask next to your layer.

Now try clicking once on the layer icon on your Whites layer, and then click on the layer mask icon. See that a sort of outline appears around each icon when you click? That’s how you know whether which you’re painting on. It’s really important to keep an eye on this, or you’ll be following along here and it won’t work for you.

You’ve added a layer mask, but, as you noticed, nothing happened to the eye. That’s because, when the layer mask is white, it’s not blocking–masking–anything. If you paint on the layer mask with grey or black, you’ll be blocking part of the layer. You paint on the layer mask just as you would paint on the image. So, if layer mask icon is “turned on”, when you paint on the eye you’ll actually be painting on the layer mask. This was the hardest concept for me to grasp. Once you get that, you’re home free. Let’s try painting on the mask and you’ll see how it works.

Click on the layer mask icon on the whites layer, to make sure its active. With a fairly big brush, at 50% hardness, using solid black at 100 opacity and flow, paint on image to remove the white you painted earlier. Sounds odd, I know, but trust me. This is how it’s done. If you make a mistake and remove too much, just switch your foreground color to white, and paint to restore what you need to restore. (Click X on the keyboard to switch back and forth from white to black.) Here’s how it looks. Notice that it says “Whites/Layer Mask” at the top of my image, which tells me I’m working on a layer mask.

Continue painting on the mask to remove the white paint from the iris and the eyelids–everywhere but the sclera. When you’re done, it will look VERY white. Here’s how it looks at this point. Notice that the layer mask icon shows a small image of my mask painting.

Jeepers creepers! That's white!

Now slide the opacity of the whites layer all the way to zero, and then gradually slide it back up just until the eyes look natural. For this image, 50% opacity looks pretty good (see top of article for the finished result.)

Thanks to Jane Conner-Ziser for showing me how to use this technique. I heartily recommend any and all of her training DVD’s, available at Software Cinema. She’s a great teacher, and explains everything really well. By the way, I’m not associated with Jane or Software Cinema; I just believe in paying it forward. Enjoy!

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The Property Bar (top) and the Brush Selector (middle), along with some sample strokes.

In last week’s post, we began an exploration of the Brush Creator. Before we go any further, I thought it might be a good idea to review the basic brush controls. Please refer to the illustration above as we go. I’ll try to make this more than just a repeat of the user manual, and include some useful hints and pointers along the way.

There are two control panels you’ll use as you paint: the Brush Selector Bar (the little one) and the Property Bar (the big one). The Property Bar contains some of the same controls you’ll find in the Brush Creator. It’s sort of a little shortcut menu of the most-commonly-changed settings. Depending on the brush type, the Grain control (g) may not be present. Let’s start on the left, and move across. First, there’s a little brush icon. This “resets” the brush currently active (Captured Bristle, in this case). This has the same effect as “restore default variant,” which we saw last week by clicking on the triangle (o) in the Brush Selector. Doing either will result in the brush being set back to it’s original settings. So if you’ve changed all the settings on the Property Bar and you want to put it back the way it used to be, click on the brush icon button. No need to worry about “breaking” a brush: you can always set it back with one click.

The next three icons control the type of brush stroke. Usually, you’ll leave it set on the default (b), freehand stroke, which allows you to move the brush in any direction. The second icon (c) allows you to draw nothing but straight lines, by clicking and connecting points. Helpful tip number one: In default (b) mode, you can constrain the brush to create straight lines by holding down the shift key before drawing. The third icon (d) is used for aligning with a path, and it’s one I haven’t used ever. You’ll use it if you’re a vector kind of person, I guess. A sample stroke is shown for the freehand and the straight line stroke types.

The remaining controls on the Property bar (e through j) are the ones you’ll adjust most often.

• Size (e) controls the size of the brush tip. You can click on it to get a drop-down slider, which is a bit slow and cumbersome. A better way is helpful tip number two: increase and decrease the size with the [ and ] keys. On the Intuos 4 graphics tablet, I’ve programmed the Touch Ring to these keys, so I can adjust size easily without interrupting my work flow.
• Opacity (f) controls the density of paint being applied. For smooth transitions, such as in facial skintones, use a low opacity setting (20% or less). Helpful tip number three: you can change the Opacity setting in ten percent increments by typing a number (1 gives you 10%, 2 gives you 20%, etc.).
• Grain(g) is a setting that you’ll see here for certain brushes where graininess is a factor, such as chalk and pastel. Grain does not work consistently for brushes in Painter. Sometimes you need to set it to a low value to get grain to show up, other times a high value works instead. My advice is, if you’re using a brush with the Grain setting and the brush doesn’t seem to want to paint, try sliding the Grain to the other end of the slider. If that works, slowly back it off until you get the amount of graininess you’re after.
• Resat (h) is short for resaturation, which is similar to Flow in Photoshop. Think of a real-world brush. Loading it up with pigment is like having the Resat set to a high value. Using the brush with no pigment is like Resat set to zero. Which leads us to helpful tip number four: You can turn most any brush into a blender by setting Resat to 0. A common way I use this is to apply paint with a relatively high Resat value (40 or 50), and then I’ll turn it to 0 to do some blending. This is just like the “real world,” where you wipe your brush on a rag to get the paint out, for blending work.
• Bleed controls how much the brush interacts with the underlying colors, including the paper color. In my own experience, this control is very subtle, so give it some time and experiment. It does work.
• Jitter causes the brush to jump around randomly. A little bit of Jitter can give you a nice soft line. Again, play with it, see how it works, and see what works for you.

So that’s it for the big Property Bar. There’s not a whole lot to the Brush Selector, but it’s important to know the parts and what they’re called. First, there’s the brush icon (k), which is different for each category. The second icon (l) represents the variant. In this case the category is Acrylics and the variant is Captured Bristle. This is stated again in words (m and n). Lastly comes the triangle (o), which we took a brief look at last week. Click on this to get a fly-out menu of brush-related stuff. We’ll get to that another time.

Which leaves us with just one more helpful tip: these two bars, and most of the other palettes in Painter, have a little area in the very left (to the left of (a)), with a little clear circle inside it. Click on the circle to dismiss the bar. Click and drag elsewhere in that little area, and you can move the bar anywhere you’d like. Next week, we’ll get back to creating custom brushes. Thanks for reading!

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Even though Corel Painter ships with hundreds of brushes, in every conceivable type of media, there are times when you wish you could tweak a brush to make it work more to your liking. But the Brush Creator is an intimidating beast. There are so many options! So many controls! Where do you begin? As they say, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, so let’s take it one step at a time. Rather than attempting to explain everything about customization, we’ll take a look at some simple tweaks, and just get our feet wet. The more you know about how Painter works, the more powerful–and useful–it becomes. So let’s get started.

The first thing you should know is this: It’s not you; it’s Painter. You’re not stupid, or dense, or slow. The fault lies with Painter’s user interface for controlling the brushes. It’s confusing, unintuitive, and is missing some basic controls and functionality. This really isn’t meant as a dig at Corel. People much smarter than you or I have tried to understand the Brush Creator and are now recovering in a state-run facility, wearing a shirt on backwards, drooling the afternoon away. If you know, going in, that it’s hard, you’ll have the proper expectations. We’re going to take it in nice easy chunks, and together we will conquer this thing. Or at least, part of it.

First, a little background theory. Painter’s brush customization interface is called the “Brush Creator,” which can be misleading. Why? Because you really can’t create a brush from scratch, like you can a document. It should really be called “Brush Customizer,” because that’s how you make a custom brush: by making changes to a copy of an existing brush. Painter ships with a set of brushes which you can modify, if you like, using the process we’re going to look at next. If you decide you want to go back to the factory defaults, that’s easily done, as you’ll see. But rather than modify the delivered brush, you might prefer to make a copy of it and make it your own. Give it a name you like, such as “Suzy’s Special Spackler” or “Ted’s Terrific Blender”. For our first lesson, we’ll create our own version of the popular Captured Bristle brush. One last note: Painter uses the term “variant” a lot. A variant is just a brush, such as “Captured Bristle” or “Digital Airbrush”. Variants are grouped into categories, such as “Acrylics” or “Airbrushes.”

Click on the triangle on the right side of the brush selector to get this drop-down menu.

To begin, select the “Captured Bristle” variant in the “Acrylics” category (see above), using the Brush Selector. Then, click on the triangle on the right of the Brush Selector. You’ll see the drop-down menu as shown. Today we’ll just hit on a few of these menu choices. First, let’s restore “Captured Bristle” to its factory settings before we copy it. In the drop-down menu, click on “Restore Default Variant.” Nothing seems to happen, but trust me, you’ve restored the brush. Now we’ll make our copy. I’ll bet you’re thinking of clicking on “Copy Variant,” aren’t you? Silly you. Common sense would tell you to do just that, but remember, we’re in Painterland, where the rules are strange and mysterious. You should, instead, click on “Save Variant…” When you do, a save dialogue appears, with the name filled in for you as “Captured Bristle.” By changing this name, you are creating your own copy of “Captured Bristle.” Let’s call our new brush “Smooth Captured Bristle.” Just type the word “Smooth” in front of the existing name. Leave the “Save Current Colors” checkbox unchecked, and click OK. A new variation named “Smooth Captured Bristle” has been added to the Acrylics category. To see it, click on the brush selector drop-down, and there it is, down in the “S” part of the list. Select it.

Click on the down-pointing triangle next to the brush icon to get the list of brush variants. There's our new one!

Now it’s time to actually customize the brush you’ve just created. Click on the right-pointing triangle again (the one we started with — see top first screenshot, above) to get the drop-down list. From that, click on “Show Brush Creator.” (You can also go Window > Show Brush Creator, or CMD/CTL + B.) The infamous Brush Creator appears. (Cue scary music.) Here’s what it looks like.

Going down the left side you see a list of options. Click on the one called “Random.” The middle section changes depending on what you’ve selected in the list. Look for the slider labeled “Jitter.” Slide it to the left until it reads 0.00. Try drawing in the scratchpad area on the right, varying the value for Jitter, and you’ll see what Jitter does. It scatters the dab image. By turning it off, we get a nice smooth stroke, quite different from the usual Captured Bristle. And we’ve changed just one parameter to do it. Guess what? We’re done! But you need to save your work, and gee, there’s no Save button on the Brush Creator. (This is one of the missing buttons I told you about.) Right now, if you clicked “Restore Variant,” you would lose your changes. So, let’s save. To do so, go to the drop-down on the Brush Selector (not the Brush Creator, as you’d expect) and select “Save Variant…” as you did at the beginning. This time, leave the name as is (”Smooth Captured Bristle”). It will prompt you with a warning (”Are you aware that a variant with this name exists? Are you sure you know what you’re doing??”) Say “Yes.” Ahh. Now your new brush is saved.

Now see, that wasn’t so bad, was it? (If it was, please let me know, so I can straighten out the confusion right away.) This basic procedure (admittedly convoluted) is how you make customized brushes in Painter. Next time, we’ll try tweaking some of the other parameters, and see what sort of brush we can conjure up. Thanks for reading!

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John Derry's new training video, available now for download.

Today we’ll take a quick look at some training resources available to you right on your computer. Some of these are free, while others are very reasonably priced. This is by no means a complete list. It’s just the ones I know of that seem worth checking out. If you know of others, please feel free to mention them in the comments. And now it’s time for class!

First off, there’s John Derry’s new 90 minute video called “Portraiture: From Photo to Painting.” For a mere $20, you can learn at the feet of master…well, maybe not at his feet exactly. Derry is one of the “founding fathers” of Painter, and he continues to be actively involved in the community, especially as an instructor. This is a download of the webinar from November 2009. So if you missed it, here’s your chance. This is a beginner’s introduction to using Painter to turn photographs into paintings.

The Digital Art Academy offers a variety of online classes. They combine PDF files along with video tutorials, as well as interaction with the instructor. Instructors include Anne Carter-Hargrove, Marilyn Sholin, Scott Deardorff, Karen Bonaker, Jill Garl, Tim Shelbourne, and Susi Lawson. Prices are very reasonable, especially for training of this quality.

Craig’s Tutorials is a single page of tutorials, some in video format, for beginning Painter. Free.

Imagine FX magazine’s website offers 150 tutorials from past issues of the magazine, all free. There’s a ton of content here. Tutorials consist of PDF files to download along with support files.

LVS (Leader in Virtual Studies) is an online classroom similar in concept to the Digital Art Academy, above. A large range of subjects in addition to digital art are taught here. Courses run from $12 to $30.

Xtrain offers video training in everything from web design to basic drawing to digital photography to digital art. There are some free videos here, as well as paid.

That’s all for this week. Be sure to check out the Resources and Links page for more training resources and lots of other interesting, helpful stuff.

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This portrait by Richard Schmid displays the loose brushwork associated with alla prima painting.

To begin, let’s take a look at two paintings that exemplify the two major types of oil painting (alla prima and glazing). Here you can see how each approach results in a different sort of look, even when the subject matter is similar. The first, “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose”, 1885-1886, is by John Singer Sargent. It may not look all that loose, but keep in mind that the painting is very large (68×60″). The second is by a master of the glazing technique, Maxfield Parrish. It’s called “The Lantern Bearers”, executed in 1910.

Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose by John Singer Sargent. Oil on canvas.

The Lantern Bearers, by Maxfield Parrish. Oil on canvas.

And here are two landscapes for comparison. The first is by contemporary artist Richard Schmid, the second once again by Maxfield Parrish. Here, the difference in approach is more obvious. In Schmid’s work, the hand of the artist is very much part of the work; in Parrish’s work, it’s nearly invisible.

Alla prima landscape by Richard Schmid. Oil on canvas, 2009.

Evening Shadows, by Maxfield Parrish. Oil, 1950.

Maxfield Parrish achieved his jewel-like colors by employing many layers of pigment, each sealed by a layer of varnish. He used colors straight from the tube, allowing the transparent glazes to optically mix, much like in a watercolor. It was a very time-consuming process, since it required drying time between layers of paint and varnish. The alla prima method, on the other hand, is fast. To emulate Parrish’s method using Corel Painter, you would use (obviously) layers, and just skip the varnish! In a future tutorial, we’ll take a look at how to do a master-copy of Parrish’s work using Corel Painter. To emulate Schmid’s alla prima technique in Painter, you would stick to a single layer (the Canvas), and mix your colors using the Mixer palette.

That’s all pretty obvious stuff, I suppose, but what if you wanted to use color cloning? Can you get that fresh, loose look while cloning? The answer is yes, and the trick is to use Quick Clone. When I’m working on a portrait that needs to look “painterly,” I usually begin with a blank canvas, and pull the color from the original image onto the canvas. I don’t use the Clone brushes, usually, since they will pull in too much detail, and that’s not the look I’m after. To begin, open your file in Painter, and then go File > Quick Clone. In the upper right corner you’ll see a drop-down that allows you to adjust the transparency of the tracing paper. To make sure the tracing paper is turned on, go CMD+T(Mac) or CTL+T(Windows). This is a toggle, that will turn it on and off. In the screen shot below, I’ve got the clone open and positioned above the original, and I’m selecting 80% opacity for my tracing paper.

You can use any brush you like to begin “blocking in” the color. For this example, I’ll use the Acrylics variant Captured Bristle. Set it to 90% opacity, 50% resat, and a good firm stroke to bring in the color. Leaving the tracing paper turned on, but faint (like around 80%) allows you to stroke along the forms in the image, such as the figure and the tree branches. For areas with lots of small detail, look for the larger forms that contain those details. Use a big brush, like size 60 or greater. (If your image is small, 60 may be too big.)

With the orignal open at the same time, begin to block in the major shapes. I'm probably being too detail-oriented here.

Taking my time and being somewhat careful, one hour later I have the following image. You could, at this point, use a Soft Cloner at low opacity to bring out some of the foliage details, and refine the figure. Just don’t get carried away, or it’ll turn back into a photograph! I hope this quick exercise gives you ideas for new approaches to your painting. Let us know how you do!

A one-hour alla prima painting, using a Quick Clone to start with.

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Painted version, using ArtRage 3

We mentioned a few weeks back that ArtRage 3 had been released. Today I decided to take the demo out for a spin, put it through its paces, and report back. The results were not very impressive, though I do see some improvement. I also see that the price tag of the full-featured version has increased from $25 USD to $80 USD, and the reduced-feature version has gone from free to $40. Quite a jump. Is it worth it? Not in my opinion, though I should mention that I’ve been using Corel Painter nearly every day for the last five years. Today’s exercise made me realize I’d been taking Painter for granted. It’s very powerful, and there’s really nothing else like it. That said, I believe it’s too expensive, bloated, and I wish someone would buy it from the meatheads at Corel and give it a proper home. The release last year of version 11 was a disaster, and I’m sticking with version 10 until they come out with an actual upgrade to the program. As you can tell, I’m not the typical Corel fanboi, but I do use Painter and love it. For the type of work I do everyday (photo painting for photographers), I’m afraid ArtRage 3 just won’t cut it. But I had fun playing with it today, anyway. Here’s what I found.

Original photo used, courtesy of Best Friends Photography.

As you can see from the before and after of the cute pup above, I was able to paint a passable portrait, using the equivalent of the smear brush in Photoshop, or the various blenders in Painter. These worked well for the dog. ArtRage has a cloning ability, though it’s not called that. It’s called a tracing. As with Painter, you can tell ArtRage to use a file for color information, to clone color. This is the way I work when altering photographs for photography studios, so it’s what I concentrated on during the “road test.” To use the tracing facility, you begin by creating a new painting, using the following dialogue box.

The new painting dialogue. Click on the green icon to bring in your file for tracing/cloning.

ArtRage conveniently allows you to determine your new file based on the size of the file you’re tracing. You can also just skip the trace file input, and work from scratch. You’ll also choose your paper texture here. The paper or canvas texture works much like Painter’s, except it doesn’t seem to “fill in” with paint; the texture remains fully visible no matter how much paint you apply. You can change the paper texture later, if you like.

After opening your new painting file, you can control the visibility of the color source image (the tracing), much like with Painter’s tracing paper. I like the controls and feel of ArtRage quite a bit, and don’t miss the Windows-clutter of Painter at all. You can easily switch the clone-color option off by clicking on the color palette, but to go back, you’ll need to dig into the menu to tell ArtRage to once again use the tracing for color information. The brushes, familiar from version 2.5, work well for color cloning, though I couldn’t get the palette knife to apply color to a blank canvas, either with color clone turned on or off. It may be designed that way. The new Sticker Spray brush doesn’t clone color accurately at all. Blues come in as yellow, or red…it seems broken.

In Painter, it’s common to start with a “Quick Clone,” which is a blank canvas. The tracing paper control allows you to see a ghosted image of the source you’re cloning. You can do the same with ArtRage, but here is where I really began to appreciate how well Painter does this. ArtRage does not bring in color accurately, to make a long story short. I tried to work from a blank canvas, and then clone back in from the original photo. The results were always crude and disappointing.

What worked much better was telling ArtRage, via the menu, to apply the tracing image to the canvas. This is like a standard clone in Painter, and it’s how I painted the dog at the top of the article. I used a soft variant of the palette knife, which worked just like a blender or the smear brush in Photoshop. New to version 3 are a whole new category of brushes, which seem to be made using a whole new technology. It takes some getting used to. It’s called the Sticker Spray brush. Stickers are similar to the Image Hose in Painter. But they also seem like a new direction for ArtRage, and I wish they had implemented it across the board instead of off to the side, so to speak. I also wish they had finished getting the bugs out before releasing it. There’s a lot of power and flexibility here, but the color cloning, as mentioned earlier, is broken. The colors are not even close to correct. ArtRage’s version of the Brush Creator is not intuitive or well-documented. Controls all over the place, in fact, have names which signal nothing to me. For instance, what the heck is “Drip Spike”? “Auto-flatten”?

ArtRage comes with a lot of brushes that remind me of a program my kids used to play with years ago, KidPix. Why anyone would want to paint with dominoes or cartoon leaves is beyond me. Interviews with the owners of ArtRage indicate they are trying to please everyone from grandma to professional illustrators. They seem to be taking the same road Painter did, adding all kinds of useless fluff with each new release. It’s a shame, because there’s a need for a nice, clean, strong painting program. Do digital artists really want stencils, rulers, and all the odd little toy brushes ArtRage offers? I doubt it. But that’s just my take. You can download and install the demo of ArtRage for free, and it’s good for thirty days. Give it a try, and let me know what you think.

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Use Corel Painter's Colorize compositing mode to quickly add color to black and white images.

Turning a black and white photo into a color photo can be a challenge, even in with today’s advanced software. When you hear the word “colorization,” you probably think of an old movie on Turner Broadcasting. Or you may think of the pre-color film days, when photographers would use an airbrush to add color to photos. In either case, the coloring is flat and unrealistic. Luckily there’s a way to get much better results than that, and it’s built right into Corel Painter. It’s not quite as easy as hitting a “colorize” button, but almost. You can use this technique to bring vintage photographs to life, and turn your own black and white images into color paintings. If you’re a beginning artist just beginning the transition from monochrome to color, you may want to consider this technique. You can establish your drawing and values first in black and white, and then apply color without losing your under drawing. This is just another one of the many advantages of working digitally.

Painter has layer blending modes similar to Photoshop, but they are called composite methods. In both programs, these are found in the upper left corner of the layers palette. By choosing “Color” in either program, you’ll be able to paint a transparent layer of color which allows the layer below to show through. This works pretty well, but even better is Painter’s “Colorize” composite method. As you’ll see, it applies color only where there is some value of grey on the layer below. It won’t leave any color at all in areas of your photo that are pure white. For those areas, we’ll use a second layer with a composite method of Multiply. Multiply “adds” to whatever is below, even if it’s white. Experiment with both layer blending types to see how they work. This technique employs both together, each on a separate layer.

To get started, open your scan of an old photograph (or of a black and white drawing you’ve done) in Corel Painter. The image is on the background layer, which Painter calls the Canvas. Make the layers palette visible if it’s not already (go Window > Show Layer). We’ll do all our color work on layers above the Canvas, leaving the original image untouched. To add a new layer, go Layer > New Layer, or better yet, just click on the new layer icon in the layers palette. It’s the icon at the bottom, third from the left (see above).

Step One

Double-click on the new layer’s name, and a dialogue pops up. Use this to rename the layer to “colorize.” With this layer active (highlighted), we can begin to add color. For this, I use the Soft Charcoal variant of the Charcoal category. Use an opacity of about 50%, and choose a light peach color. Set the resat value to 50%. With light pressure on the tablet, begin stroking color onto the face, making sure the colorize layer is active. You’ll notice that more color is applied to the darker areas of the face and neck. To avoid the usual flat look of colorizations, vary your colors as you paint. Use a rosier color for the cheeks and under the eyes. Choose a nice brilliant red for the lips. Add color as appropriate for clothing and hair. You’ll be applying washes of color that seem to magically combine with the greys from the photo. Here’s what you’ll have at the end of step one:

Light washes of color are quickly applied to the colorize layer using Soft Charcoal. I've left the background untouched.

Step Two

Now add a new layer, and rename it Multiply. Change its composite method to (you guessed it) multiply. In the example above, you may have noticed that the area of the model’s shoulder (her back, really) and parts of her face are still white. As explained above, in colorize mode, the white accepts no color. So we’ll add a touch of color to the whites here on the multiply layer. Use the same peach color as before. If it looks too dark for a sunlit area, just lower the multiply layer’s opacity until it looks right. I used 90%.

Color is added to the model's back and white areas on the face using the multiply layer.

Step Three

Things look pretty good already, but we’ll take it one step further. Clone the image by going File > Clone. Make sure that cloning is active (the “rubber stamp” icon is greyed out, as is the color wheel). Use the Soft Charcoal with the same settings as above. The Soft Charcoal acts as a blender, melting the greys of the original image with the colors you added. This results in a nice smooth finish, eliminating the grain of the old photo. That’s why the final image looks so much better than a plain colorized photo. You’ve really combined the color with the photo, not just sprayed it on top.

Face and clothing are complete, after blending the clone copy.

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Cottingley, by louvre89, a rising star on deviantArt. This photomanipulation is made up of many images...but you'd never know it!

Two-dimensional digital art tends to fall into one of two main categories: Digital Painting and Photomanipulation. Under Digital Painting you’ll find Speed Painting (a quick rendering done freehand, usually with Photoshop), and digital painting (same as speed painting, but not so speedy). Photomanipulation refers to creating a new image by pasting together elements from other images, a sort of digital collage. These categories are just for convenience, however, and sometimes it’s hard to classify a given work. Photomanips, as they’re called, tend to include lots of digital painting, to help blend the elements together. As you can see, the line between them is blurry, and often totally arbitrary. Given this rather unhelpful introduction, I thought we’d take a look at the work of a rising star on deviantArt.com, named Louvre89. She’s a 20-something Australian artist who’s starting to get professional freelance assignments, and it’s no wonder: she’s very, very good. In today’s article, we’ll dissect the work above, “Cottingley,” to see how the artist combined images to create something new.

First off, I’d like to express my thanks to Louvre89 for taking the time to document, using links, each of the images she used in the creation of “Cottingley.” On deviantArt, it’s standard practice to credit the stock artists whose work you’ve used; but Louvre89 takes it one step further and creates a link pointing to the actual file used. This makes our work as detectives so much easier. If you’re interested in learning how photomanipulation works, I’d heartily recommend that you check out this artist’s works, and spend time exploring the link credits to see what she started with. I’ve actually done just that in putting this article together. I hope it will encourage you to explore on your own. It’s a great way to learn.

Stock Fantasy Background2, by deviantArt stock contributor anaRasha. This is a terriffic starting point.

Louvre89 began with the image above, by deviantArt stock artist anaRasha. This makes a great starting point, since it’s like a stage set, waiting for further details to be added. The perspective is simple two-point, so as along as all of your photos are taken straight-on, they’ll match the perspective easily. Imagine you’re sitting in a theatre, sitting in the very center of the orchestra section. You have before you a short foreground, and then a straight, flat wall of a background. This is a good, simple stage setting to create a convincing photomanip with. As you get more advanced, you can move on to three-point perspective, with aerial views, plunging canyons, high mountains, and so forth. But start simple.

Here's a quick refresher. Thanks to Helen South on About.com for the nice illustration of Two Point Perspective.

In the following gallery are the remaining images used to create “Cottingley.” I’m amazed, when I look at how these sort of images are made, at how creative the artist was in choosing the source images. The key seems to be imagination. Rarely will you find exactly the images you need out there in stock photo land. You’ll need to creatively crop them, adjust, warp, twist, and otherwise bend them to your will. For instance, look at how the artist cropped the image of the large tree to use for her main “tree house” image.

 

Thanks again to Louvre89. Be sure to stop by and check out her beautiful work!

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Learn how to combine filter effects using layers. Hand-painted by Bob Nolin at A Work of Art Studio, using Corel Painter X. Image copyright Photography on the Run.

The secret to creating eye-catching portraits is contrast. By using the full range of values from dark to light, you can really make your subject stand out and draw the viewer in. Adding bold, complementary colors can help, too. We’ll take a look at how you can start with an ordinary drab photo reference and end up with a dramatic portrait. This tutorial shows how to combine filter effects in Photoshop, using layers, prior to opening the file in Painter for digital painting.

Original photo, shot at a Renaissance fair by Photography on the Run. Used with permission.

To begin with, look at your reference photo and think about how you can increase contrast. As you can see in the “before” image (left), there’s already a natural lighting coming up from underneath, so we’ll try to build on that. We’re going to use a series of filters to enhance the photo in Photoshop, and then bring it into Painter for an oil painting treatment. Even if you don’t own the particular filters I’m using here, you’ll be able to use the technique with your own filters.

Step One

The first filter we’re going to use is from Topaz Labs, and it’s their Adjust filter. (This is similar to the Lucis Art filter.) Use the preset called “Psychedelic.” This creates the high-contrast, high-detailed look you see below. Apply the filter and then save the file with a name, such as Psychedelic.psd. Set this file aside for now.

Using the Adjust filter from Topaz Labs brings out a high-contrast image we'll use in our layer sandwich, to add punch.

Step Two

Next, we’ll use the Nik Color Effects Pro filter called Warmth/Brilliance. This will add a nice warm glow to the skin tones, and push the colors a bit. By using the Control Point tool, we can easily restrict the filter to just the face, without having to creating a layer mask. You can see how this looks in the next screenshot. The control handles are very easy and intuitive to use. Apply the filter, and a new layer is created for you. Save and continue. (Note: if you’re using some other filter for this step, make sure you first duplicate the background layer, and run your filter on the duplicate. At the end of Step Two, you should have a new layer on top of the original background layer.)

Using the Warmth/Brilliance filter from Nik Color Effects Pro. The control point is the thing with lines and dots on top of the poor gent's nose.

Step Three

After running the warmth filter in Step Two, use Photoshop’s Paint Daubs filter (Filter > Artistic > Paint Daubs), making sure the new layer from Step Two is active. Our goal here is to add some surface detail. Later, when we get into Painter, this will really help with the brushwork. Use the Dark Rough option, with a brush size of 5, sharpness of 7. Save.

Run the Paint Daubs filter on the same layer created in Step Two, and then give it a descriptive name.

Step Four

Remember the Psychedelic.psd file you created back in Step One? Open it up, if it’s not already open, and drag the thumbnail from the layers palette into the current file. It will create a new layer for you. (Or, in the Psychedelic.psd file, you can just go Select > All, then Edit > Copy. In the file we’re working on, go Edit > Paste.) Rename this new layer to “Psychedelic Overlay 35%.” Delete the Background layer. Change the blending mode to Overlay, and turn down the opacity to about 35%. Now we’ve got lots of drama! As a final touch, drag the bottom (Paint Daubs) layer down to the Duplicate Layer icon. Position this copy as the top layer. Change the blending mode to Luminosity, and turn down the opacity to 20%. This will brighten things up a bit . Here’s what your layers should look like at this point.

Step Five – Painter

Save this file, and then flatten it (Layer > Flatten Image), and save with a new name. (It’s always a good idea to keep a copy of your work with the layers intact.) Now you’re ready to open the file in Painter. Clone the file, and choose the Captured Bristle brush, set at 90% opacity, 20% Resat. This will give you very obvious brushstrokes, so take your time and use short strokes. Vary the size. Use small sizes around the eyes and other detailed areas, larger sizes for the skin areas. Let’s add the complement of the orange skintone, green. Choose a very dark green and paint over the background, leaving just a suggestion of foliage detail.
That’s it!

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Art Rage 3 has just been released. (You can read our review of the previous version here.) It now comes in two flavors: Studio ($40) and Studio Pro ($80). Click here for the press release info.

In October, Sumo Paint 2.0 was released. (You can read our review of the previous version here.) In addition to the free online version of this Photoshop-like app, there’s now a downloadable Pro version for $19. This allows you to run Sumo locally on your machine, which should speed up responsiveness.

Rollip sounds like something you’d buy at Ikea, perhaps, but it’s actually a small online application for processing photos with various effects. It’s free, and has a range of Photoshop-like filters.

Photovisi is another free online app that looks like Rollip’s twin brother. As with Rollip, you upload images and process them. Photovisi then creates a neat photo collage for you. You can download it (to use as a screensaver, perhaps). Even cooler, you can print your collage on a variety of products through Zazzle. What a great idea!

Lightwyrm.com is a new digital art gallery and forum. They also offer some Painter and Photoshop tutorials.

Designermart offers some tutorials and resources for creating slick car illustrations, using Photoshop or 3D Studio Max.

This last item is just for fun. Machinarium is one of the best-looking, most well-designed, funniest and cleverest games I’ve ever played. Just check out the free demo and you’ll be hooked. An amazing achievement by a small group of developers and artists in the Czech Republic. $20.

Got something cool you’d like to share? Drop us a line: webmaster at digitalimagemagazine.com

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