shadenights

Today, I am going to show all you nice people that it doesn’t necessarily take a lot of work in Photoshop to make a regular picture look artistic. The skill required for this tutorial is basic and it shouldn’t take too long for you to accomplish what I am going to show you. The only requirement for this tutorial, besides Photoshop, is a nice sweet picture that you would like to digitally convert to an artistic painting. For a process this simple, it gives rather nice results.
To start with, try and avoid pictures that hide the important details among shadows. What is slightly visible among shadows will simply disappear after you run some filters on it. So, as much as you can, try to use a sunny picture with sufficient amounts of light in it.
Go ahead and open the picture you are going to use. I'm using a rather nice and simple picture of this sweet looking dog.

First of all, we are going to use the Cutout filter. Cutout gives a "paintbrush painting" type of effect to the picture. To use Cutout, go to Filter, Artistic, Cutout.

The image should start to look fairly artistic now. To give the second part of the artistic touch, we will make the image look like it has been painted on a canvas. To give the canvas effect, we will once again turn to the filters. For this, we use the Texturize filter, which we can access by going to Filter, Texture, Texturizer.

You are done! No, I'm not kidding. This really is it. This is probably the fastest way of making your regular images a little more artistic. Of course, as I said in the beginning, the better your image, the nicer your results. It’s amazing the kind of results you can get by combining a couple of these filter effects

Isn’t this absolutely perfect for a Christmas card?! You can use this effect to make a personalized digital card for someone or you can even print your own family Christmas cards. Combine this effect with some of the glossy effects we have discussed in the past to create your own personal fuzzy, warm and artistic masterpiece!

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