The advantage is that you can add only the ones you need, since they are made available as separate plugins.

Filed under Photoshop plugin Plugin pack Optional plugin Plugin Photoshop Pack Photo.

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Background Landscape layer complete Next, we need to paint the cabin.

In this tutorial I will show you the techniques and the tricks to convert a photo into a great-looking painting.

I must start by stating that if youre really serious about digital painting, you should consider Corel Painter 11, which is a dedicated natural-media painting program that allows you to use anything from a HB pencil to chalk, charcoal and watercolors and also simulates the canvas properties in addition to the brushes.

Nevertheless, Photoshops new offering is a solid one and more than enough for many artists.

For best results, a Wacom tablet like the new Intuos 4 is also recommended, although not required.

Theory There are two new features used for painting in Photoshop CS5.

New options in the Brushes Panel With the new brushes, you can control the number of bristles, length, thickness and stiffness and not only can you see the result in the brush panel, you also get an overlay window that shows you the 3D virtual brush and its bristles.

Paint Preview I am not really a big fan of the brush preview window but thankfully you can turn it off if you find it distracting.

The second ingredient in the digital paint toolbox is the Mixer Brush.

As you paint, it smudges and mixes the color, as if you were using wet paints.

Regular brush (left) and Mixing brush (right) The way the brush color is mixed with the canvas is controlled by three parameters the wetness of the paint, the load of the brush and the mix amount between the paint color and the canvas color.

Mixing Brush Parameters To illustrate these parameters, I brushed quickly over an image with different settings: Different Mixing Brush options So, a heavy load will carry more paint over a stroke than a light load; wetness smudges and mixes the canvas color with the paint color; a high mix rate will use more of the canvas color than the paint color.

Practice The real magic with the Mixing Brush is that you can paint using the colors from a picture, effectively helping to you turn a photo into a painting with little effort.

To demonstrate this, I will start with a nice photo I took 10 years ago on film.

Select the Mixing Bush and from the top bar choose the preset Very Wet, Heavy Mix; choose the brush that you want from the Brushes panel and make it a big size.

To paint on the new layer using the colors from the background, with the Mixing Brush tool selected, make sure that the option Sample All Layers at the top is selected.

Deselect the icon (Load the brush after each stroke) then Alt-click on the image to load the brush and start painting on the new layer.

To paint effectively, you need to think in terms of layers, from background to foreground and from broad to detail.

Therefore well start painting the background, using broad strokes with a large brush tip, ignoring the shackcabin completely.

Your strokes should more or less follow the contours of the terrain and clouds.

Hide the background layer temporarily to see the effect so far: Background (landscape) layer work in progress As you can see, I smudged the colors over the shack as if it did not exist.

Keep working until you fill the layer and are happy with the result.

Oil Paint Plugin For Photoshop Cs5 Mac