Jin's Photo Enhancements - Three Versions and Clone Painting from Photo

[Jin]

Hi folks,

It's taken me a while to get around to doing this, but I'd like to share some photo enhancements I've done using Painter 8. You can take a look and read about the photographer, Lance Rivera, the Yahoo group, Digital Nuts, where I met his wife Nancy one of the owners/moderators, and the process I used to enhance his photo (three versions) at:

http://www.pixelalley.com/photo_enha...ancements.html

Another photo, an old one of mine taken in the California Sierra Mountains, and not a very good one at that, I turned into a painting, using Painter 7 and a custom brush variant named Jinny's’…’‚‚© Brush, a gift to me from Paulo Roberto Purim who's another artist and dear friend.

http://www.pixelalley.com/2001-2002-...-by-paulo.html

I used Painter's Clone feature to do the painting, which allows us to take color information from an original photo or other image specified as the Clone Source and paint it into a new image, the Clone.

In this case, though it's not always the way an artist uses the extremely versatile Clone feature, I first made a Clone of the photo (an exact copy), then deleted the image from the Clone to leave a blank white Canvas, and turned on another Painter feature, Tracing Paper, which displays a 50% opacity view of the original photo or image.

Then, with the Clone Colors box checked, to tell Painter to take color information from the original photo, I began. This one took me a couple of hours one very early morning and it was a lot of fun as Paulo's custom brush almost paints by itself (well not really by itself). You'd have to try it to know what I mean, but others who have used it say the same thing. It's soft and liquid, pushes color around, and does some surprising and often lovely things in response to pressure, using a pressure sensitive Wacom tablet and stylus (pen).

Lots of wonderful things can be done with photos using Painter, especially because of it's huge number of brush variants most of which can be made to work as Cloners and the fact that we can create endless numbers of our own custom brush variants to get nearly any effect we want.

In addition, multiple photos can be combined in a single final painting using a variety of brush variants and other features in Painter, like applying texture with either with brush variants that pick up the current Paper texture or by using the Effects menu's Apply Surface Texture option. Much more to say, and if you either do, or plan to, own Painter, we'll help you learn the many wonderful ways to use it.

Thanks for taking a peek. Comments are most welcome.

[STaylor]

Great work Jin ’‚’‚…‚’‚‚¦’‚’‚…‚’‚‚¦It would be nice if some your students shared their work from your class here in the retouching forum ’‚’‚…‚’‚‚¦.I’‚’‚…‚’‚…¾‚m sure that I’‚’‚…‚’‚…¾‚m not the only one that would enjoy see it ’‚’‚…‚’‚‚¦.

[Jin]

Hi,

Thanks for taking a look at the images, and for your nice comment.

I've let everyone at TutorAlley Forums know about BytePhoto so I guess we'll have to wait 'til they're motivated.

My students aren't really working with photos much in the classes, as I'm teaching them how to handle/manage the interface and palettes, learn keystroke commands, create custom palettes, then learn how to manage Painter's brushes. That takes up two class weeks. Then there's a series on Layers and other objects layered above the Canvas, along with lessons using several other Painter features.

In one of the classes' lessons, we do some Clone painting but we use a photo supplied on the CD's by Corel and I don't think it's a good idea for us to publish those, since there are restrictions on their use.

Since Painter is such a complex program, it's best for people to learn the basics before plunging in too far with painting and creating other images. If they don't learn the basics, they run into all kinds of frustrations.

Later, when I teach the more fun things.. like painting.. there may be some students who use photos as a basis and I'll remind them about your site.

[IcarusFree]

Great enhacements Jin. I really liked your first version of Lance Rivera's leaves. I will try to reproduce your steps in PS 5.0 and see how it works in one of my pictures. Thanks for sharing!