Hand-painting tutorial

As you work your way through these lessons, hopefully you will see that the same techniques can be applied to your own images and not just to the ones I have supplied.  Here is another very simple technique that can turn a very ordinary record shot of St Petersburg into something quite different.

 Open the image St Petersburg image and then Control+J to duplicate it, and with the duplicate layer selected, go to Enhance>Adjust Colour>Remove Colour.  Then Filter>Stylize>Find Edges.  We need to soften this image considerably so go to Enhance>Adjust Lighting>Brightness and Contrast and adjust Brightness to + 50 and reduce the Contrast to -100.  But you might prefer your own settings. 

You should now have a soft line drawing effect, but remember that the layer underneath is in full colour, so we will remove some of the top layer to reveal part of it.  

Pick a soft-edged brush about 45 pixels and with the opacity at 100%, proceed to remove about half of the top layer. What we are trying to achieve is to make our image look like a work in progress painting.

Now open the arm image. Use the Magic Wand Tool with a tolerance of 20 pixels and click inside the white area.  Go to Select>Inverse to select the arm and then Copy & Paste the arm into the main image.  You can use the Move Tool to drag the selection into position.

To finish off, make sure that the duplicate layer is selected, and with the foreground colour black select a soft-edge brush (about 30 pixels) and set the opacity to 20% and then carefully paint in a shadow underneath the arm and wiper.  Because the opacity is low you can go over it many times until you are happy with the result.