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Stan Schutze | all galleries >> Modeling Photography >> Christine > Painting
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Stan Schutze

Painting

This is my first attempt at brush painting. In order to see the detail, please view image at original full size.

My big question right now is this: How can I shrink it down to screen size without losing all the detail?

Please help!


other sizes: small medium large original auto
comment
Wolfgang25-Feb-2008 17:15



Mark: there were no special effects filters.

I made a 1:1 crop in the image that follows this one, but you still have to click "original" to see the detail.

This was exploratory by hand in Photoshop only with normal tools and layers. It's fairly straight forward. Except for the hand stroking, the adjustments were global. No masks were used for selective treatments. Some blending from layers to increase or decrease the strength of any particular layer I was working on.



TECHNIQUE AND WORKFLOW:

1. Increasing saturation per color channel for surreal punchiness (Ctrl+U). Pushing contrast and brightness.

2. Applying Surface Blur and opposing effects in Unsharp Mask. This created both soft open areas with sharp edges. Unsharp Mask works for other things besides sharpening. This depends on how we set opposites against each other with the sliders. It can zing, or fall dead.

3. Over-stroking on an empty layer with my pen tablet by hand at about 30% opacity with various brush tips. This is fun like a coloring book. Sample colors as you go and vary the brush size to suit the detail you are brushing. Because I don't know what I'm doing, I tried several brushes ... plain soft round airbrush tip, .. then various watercolor or dry paint tips, etc. It's really a mish-mash, and the purpose was totally exploratory.

4. When I was finished over painting, then I looked at the clear texture overlays at the bottom of the Filters menu. I think I used the canvas texture and set the light from above. Size and strength to taste.



This is still a workbench piece that I wanted to share here for some feedback and guidance.

I have not yet looked at the filters in CS3. I think I agree with Mark and some others that it looks like a canned filter or multiple filters. I'm trying to get away from the "plug-in look" so that's why I'm pushing everything around by hand. I'm learning. I had fun. This is not the way I want my finished images to look. They need to look more original and personalized, and I want to get rid of the computerized look.


A BIG THANK YOU to all the others who left comments as well. I sincerely appreciate the help. One of the biggest rewards for doing what we do here is for the pleasure of all the nice people I meet :-)


Robert_Wang :-)23-Feb-2008 22:39
Excellent. Well done. V
Barry S Moore23-Feb-2008 11:29
Magnificant work. To see the brush strokes could you resize the image as 800X600 first and then apply the filter and brush strokes to the that smaller image?
Dave Hein23-Feb-2008 02:00
I don't believe you can, Stan. You can try to hold the resolution at 360dpi, but even at 800x600 and 60% quality all I see is a very beautiful image. Much of the dimpling and canvas quality is muted. I just don't think screen quality (or eye quality for that matter) is going to be good enough to allow display of these finer points of detail.
Barbara Read and Fred Schaad23-Feb-2008 01:13
You could print it but that is not what you mean. I don't think what you ask is possible. Nice work though and a great shot. V
Mark Koeppen22-Feb-2008 22:43
Nice image Stan. Lovely model and complimentary background colors. My approach would include cropping just the head and shoulders to allow the viewer to see the detail and texture in the image. This particular image would look great printed on large matte paper where you could see every inch of the image in front of you. Was this CS3's filter?