The Wedding Photographer - Steps to a Digital Watercolor

I began today's image with a photograph of a wedding photographer sitting down with his camera at the ready. I scanned in the image as 300dpi and opened it in PhotoPaint. There I cropped the image to focus on the photographer.

I used the eraser on white to roughly erase all the extraneous photograph and saved that picture as a file. I opened the file in Paint.NET to apply the Pencil Sketch filter to it. What I got was a nice sketch of him with a white background.

Saving that file I opened it next in Painter 8 and selected the Watercolor Brushes. I used a camel hair brush at varying sizes, and also for the background I used the Digital Watercolor brushes on the beginning layer.

I used two differing colors for the background an ocher and a red, brushing them around and horizontal to the seated photographer.

I reopened in PhotoPaint to create a border to the image and apply Filter Forge's Freepack 3 watercolor frame first. Then I applied a film frame to it as well. To finish it I drew a freehand black line around the image just inside of the outward most frame.

I have shared three images to give the general idea of how this piece progressed.

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Playful Digital Collage - PhotoPaint - Paint.NET

A piece of Mayangs' Bubbled Paint / Rust Texture, Dover Publica-
tions Clip Art, a portrait in pen and ink, make up today's image. I enjoy digital collage very much and it is a satisfying creative act.

I choose Flora's Feast clip art by Walter Crane of a woman playing two flutes and dancing, Another piece was a chart of a man's body with proportions. A border design on the right hand side, which I narrowed and lengthened it before placing it. To this I added an pen and ink portrait to give a central focal point.

To create the portrait I used Paint.NET and the Effects> Artistic> Ink Sketch filter with the color set to it's lowest and also lowering the ink thickness. I cut the face out and pasted it as a new image to add it.

I did all the rest of this in PhotoPaint, and used Alien Skin's Exposure 3 vignette only Round Soft filter on the whole image. In Exposure I adjusted the saturation and tone curve for color and depth. Adding a finish of Filter Forge's Freepack 3 light film frame to the image.

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Speaking Out - PostWorkShop DEMO - and Other Stories

Today's image started out as a scanned in, 300dpi, photograph of a friend of mine. He is a good friend and is very outspoken thus the title, "Speaking Out." I used various steps to produce the final image.

I first applied a Gauguin filter from PostWorkShop's DEMO version [click here] which left me with a nice image but covered with watermarks announcing the DEMO. I liked the beginning piece so I did more digital work on it.

In PhotoPaint I copied the original photograph to the clipboard, and resized the DEMO output, I pasted the original into the Gauguin image. Using the object properties I adjusted the opacity to allow the paint like portion to show through but this effectively did away with the DEMO watermarks and I merged it. As the background was sufficiently white I used the magic wand selector and added a blue violet gradient to the background.

I had some white lines around the head and face so I selected the clone tool and used that around the outline getting rid of the white. Saving that file I reopened it in Painter.

While in Painter I used a Cort pen brush and drew around the main parts of the face and head and some details of the clothing. This gave the piece a pen and ink and painted look and feel.

Back in PhotoPaint I added a small black border to the image. Then I used Filter Forge's Freepack 3 to add a black film frame which darkened some of the background, which gave it a finished appearance. I then applied the Tone Curve for added depth to the piece.

As you can see the finished piece has a nice look and feel of traditional media.


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Digital Collage - Guitar Player - Picasa 3 - Vision Board - Flaming Pear - PhotoPaint

Here is another Digital Collage made with Picasa 3. I began work in the program Vision Board Builder and formed a collage of the "Guitar Player Chording D" and other guitar photographs.

I opened this file in Painter and used the Flaming Pear filters on it to create differing styles of the beginning collage. I saved each image separately and went back to Picasa 3 to select them for another collage. I created the collage and saved it. Then I opened it in PhotoPaint to add a film frame from Filter Forge's Freepack 3.

I did some curves using the Tone Curves in PhotoPaint to give depth to this collage. I inverted my signature file and added it in white to the finished collage.

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Narrow Overpass - Paint.NET - Painter - PhotoPaint

I wanted to take a look at some older film photo-
graphs from many years of family photo-
graphy so I pulled out the ones that didn't make it into an album.

I found a few that captured my interest and here is the Narrow Overpass photograph after I scanned it in and did some digital work on it.

First I used Paint.NET to make it painterly and then used the Ink Sketch filter on that. I brought that file into PhotoPaint and I masked and added a blue violet gradient sky, as the one in the photograph was overcast and white / gray. From there I took it into Painter and used a small oil brush to paint around the trees and the railing. During this process the power lines disappeared from the sky, not missing them I saved that file.

I added a film frame with Filter Forge's Freepack 3 and resampled for posting here.

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