Watercolour painting effect
Watercolour effect on a painting ensures the richness of colours and contrast. You should select a painting or a picture where fine detailing is not very important as this effect will reduce many details.
Open the image that you want, in Photoshop and make three copies of it. You can go to layer’s palette and click on New Layers icon three times or press on keyboard Ctrl + J, three times to make copies. So, now you will have 4 layers in all in the layers palette; one background and 3 more.
Now, click on the eye ball icon of the top two layers. This is the layer visibility icon and is located on the left side of each layer in layers palette.
Now, select the first layer, the one above the background layer. Go to Filter menu at the top and select Artistic and then choose cutout.
In the cutout dialog box, make few setting changes; number of levels to 4, edge simplicity to 4 and edge fidelity to 2. Then, click Ok and exit out of the box.
Now, from the layers palette, change the blend mode of layer 1 to Luminosity. By default, the blend mode is at Normal, but you can click on the down-pointing arrow to select the blend mode options.
After this, click on the box where eye ball icon was for layer 2 which is actually copy of layer 1. Clicking on it will make this layer visible. You have to select this layer now and after selecting go to Filter menu and again choose artistic and then choose dry brush.
In the dry brush dialog box, make some changes. Make the brush size to 10, brush detail to 10 and texture to 3. In the layers palette, again, change the blend mode of this layer to screen.
The image will now appear brighter.
Make the third layer visible now by clicking on the eye ball icon box and select this layer. This layer is a second copy of layer 1. Again, go to filter menu, but this time choose Noise and then median.
In the median filter dialog box, change the radius value to 12 pixels. Median will remove the details from the image but will not blur the image. Click ok and exit out of the dialog box. Now, again, go to layers palette and change the blend mode to soft light.
The final result on the image will have the watercolour effect.
Original Authors: Siva
Edit Update Authors: M.A.Harris
Updated On: 27/04/2009
