Teach.Yourself.Adobe.Photoshop.CS2.in.10024.Hours [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Watercolors from Scratch

Sometimes you either don't have a photo of what you want to paint, or you just want to do it yourself. Perhaps you want a different style of watercolor than what's possible with the filter. If you work patiently and with some forethought, you can produce watercolors that you'd almost swear were painted with a brush on paper. Let's open a new document in Photoshop and do some painting.Hour 7, "Paintbrushes and Art Tools." As you recall, using the Tool Options bar, you can switch from a large brush to a small one, or change the opacity, with just a click. I also like to open the Swatches palette and use it as a paintbox to select colors, rather than going to the Color Picker each time. Please feel free to flip back if you need to refresh your memory about any of these issues.

Sort Your Palettes If you drag on the tabs at the top of the palettes, you can move them around so you can use the Layers, History, Color, and Swatches palettes all at once, or whatever combination of palettes you need. Close the ones you aren't using to make more room. Dock the palettes you're most likely to needfor instance, Brushes, Layers, Color, and Historyin the docking well at the right end of the Tool Options bar.

Transparency is one of the distinguishing features of real watercolor. To make a "synthetic" watercolor, you'll want to set the Brush opacity at no more than 75%. Because transparent is the opposite of opaque, this means that your paint will be 25% transparent, which is about right for watercolors. Try the brush on a blank page, and you'll notice that, as you paint over a previous stroke, the color darkens. Click the Wet Edges check box in the Brushes palette for even more authentic brush strokes. This option adds extra color along the edges of a stroke, making it look as if the pigment gathered there, as it does when you paint with a very watery brush.

Watercolor artists painting on paper often start with an outline and then fill in the details. Figure 10.5 shows the beginnings of a watercolor painting of an apple. I've drawn the fruit and its stem and leaves, and now I'm working on filling in the leaves with a small brush. It's often easier to work in a magnified view when you're doing small details like this.

Another useful trick for creating a watercolor is to use the Eraser as if it were a brush full of plain water to lighten a color that you have applied too darkly. Use it at a very low opacity to lighten a color slightly, and at a high opacity to clean up around the edges if your paintbrush got away from you. Don't forget that the Eraser always erases to the background color. If you have been changing colors as you paint, make sure to set the background color to what you want to see when you erase, or keep your painting on a separate layer from the textured background layer.

Take One Tablet For this kind of task, a pressure-sensitive graphics tablet, although not an absolute must, is certainly helpful. Drawing with a stylus is far more natural than drawing with a mouse or trackball, and the pressure-sensitive function permits you to make brush strokes that trail off like the real ones, rather than having to rely on the less versatile Fade Steps option to create the effect.

Most real watercolors are painted on heavily textured watercolor paper. If you would like yours to have the same grainy character, you can use the Texturizer (FilterTextureTexturizer) filter to add the watercolor paper texture to the picture after your painting is completed. Don't apply it until everything else is done, though, because additional changes you make will alter the texture. Figure 10.6 shows the Texturizer filter being applied.

The Canvas texture comes the closest to replicating watercolor paper, especially if you scale it down some. Sandstone works well, too. I like to set it at 70%, with a relief height of 3. Use the sliders to set relief and scaling. I find that applying the same texture a second time with the light coming from the opposite direction gives me the best imitation of textured paper. Of course, you can also print your images on real watercolor paper. Lighter weight papers run through an inkjet printer very nicely.

Oil Painting

Oil paint has a very different look from watercolor, and it's a look that Photoshop duplicates particularly well. The qualities that distinguish works in oil are the opacity of the paint, the textured canvas that adds a definite fabric grain to the image, and the thick, sometimes three-dimensional quality of the paint. To get the full effect in Photoshop, you might have to combine several techniques. We'll start, as artists do, with underpainting.

Underpainting

When an artist starts an oil painting of a landscape or a seascape, she usually sketches out the subject with a few lines, often working with charcoal or a pencil to locate the horizon and major land masses. Then she dips a big brush in thinned-out paint and begins the process of underpainting. This blocks in all the solid areas; the sky, the ground, the ocean, and any obvious features like a large rock, a cliff, or whatever else might be included. Underpainting builds the foundation of the picture, establishing the colors and values of the different parts of the image. After that, all that's left is to fill in the details.

Photoshop's Underpainting filter looks at the image that you're applying it to and reduces it to the same sort of solid blobs of color. In Figure 10.7, I'm applying the filter to a photo of a pond. If you want to download this photo and work along, it's called fallpond and it's at the Sams website discussed earlier in this hour.

Underpainting gives you the basic elements of the picture, minus the details. Using the Underpainting filter requires making some settings decisions. The Texture settings are exactly the same as in the Texturizer filter used on the watercolor. Here, though, you want to bring out more of the texture, so you use a higher relief number, and possibly a larger scale on the canvas. You can also paint on burlap, sandstone, or brick, or on textures that you import from elsewhere. The Brush Size setting ranges from 0 to 40. Smaller brushes retain more of the texture and detail of the original image. Larger brushes give a somewhat spotty coverage and remove all the detail. Texture Coverage also ranges on a scale from 0 to 40. Lower numbers here reveal less of the texture; higher numbers bring out more of it. In underpainting, the texture is revealed only where there's paint, not all over the canvas.

Overpainting

The Underpainting filter leaves you with a somewhat indistinct picture, fine for some purposes but definitely unfinished. An artist would proceed to go back and overpaint the areas that need to have detail, so that's what you'll do to complete this autumn scene.

Because oil paintbrushes tend to be rather stiff, choose a hard brush rather than a soft-edged one. Be sure to turn off Wet Edges in the Brushes palette, if it happens to be on. You'll probably also want to change the blending mode, although Normal will work fine for some parts of the painting where you want to make actual strokes of paint. However, Dissolve might be the most useful mode for working into the trees. Use it, as shown in Figure 10.9, to stipple colors into the underpainting. (Stippling means to paint with the very end of a hard round brush, placing dots rather than strokes of paint. Dissolve does this effect very well.) Vary the Brush Size and Opacity to add more or less paint with each stroke.

You can go on painting into this picture until it looks exactly like an oil painting, or you can use it as a basis to experiment with other filters and effects. In Figure 10.10, I've applied the Texturizer filter (FilterTextureTexturizer) and used it to restore the texture lost from the overpainting process. See it completed in the color section.

Pencil and Colored Pencil

The Pencil tool has been part of every graphics program since the very first ones. It's an extremely useful tool when you know how to use it properly. The Pencil tool shares a space in the toolbox with the Brush tool. You can use it (or any of the brushes) in a sort of connect-the-dots mode. Click where you want a line to begin, and Shift+click again where it should end. Photoshop draws the line for you. Keep Shift+clicking to add more line segments. The Pencil can also serve as an eraser if you click the Auto-Erase function on the Tool Options bar. With Auto-Erase enabled, when you click the Pencil point on a colored pixel that is the same color as the current foreground color, you erase it to the background color. Use this feature to clean up edges or to erase in a straight line.

Pencils are great for retouching and drawing a single pixel-width line, but difficult to use for an actual drawing. (Yes, you can set the Pencil to any of the brush shapes, but if you do that, it's functionally a brush.) The Pencil is easier to use if you zoom in to 200% so that you can see individual pixels. Setting the mouse acceleration to Slow will also help, but it's even better to use a graphics tablet instead of a mouse.

If you want to get the look of a pencil drawing without all the effort, try the Colored Pencil filter (FilterArtisticColored Pencil) or the Crosshatch filter (FilterBrush StrokesCrosshatch). The Colored Pencil filter, shown in Figure 10.11, gives you a light, somewhat more stylized drawing from your original image. It looks even better if you convert the drawing to grayscale after applying the filter. The Crosshatch filter, applied to the same image in Figure 10.12, retains much more of the color and detail, but still looks like a pen-and-ink drawing.

Chalk and Charcoal

Chalk and charcoal drawings are found in museums and collections all over the world. Artists love these materials for their ease of use and versatile lines. You can make sharp lines or smudged ones just depending on how you hold the chalk or charcoal twig.

Chalk drawings can be found on virtually any surface, from grained paper, to brick walls, to sidewalks. Chalk drawings in Photoshop enable you to take advantage of the capabilities of the Texture filters. You can place your drawing on sandstone, burlap, or on a texture that you've imported from another source.

Chalk and charcoal are linear materials, which is to say that they draw lines rather than large flat areas like paints. Choose your subjects with that in mind. You can, of course, apply shading as a pattern of lines or a crosshatch, and you can smudge to your heart's content. If you're drawing from scratch, start with a fairly simple line drawing and expand on it. If you're translating a photo or scanned image into a chalk or charcoal drawing, choose one that has strong line patterns and well-defined detail.

The Chalk & Charcoal Filter

When you apply the Chalk & Charcoal filter, which is found on the Filter menu (FilterSketchChalk & Charcoal), you'll see that it reduces your picture to three colors, using a dark gray plus the foreground and background colors that you have set in the tool window. Chalk uses the background color and Charcoal becomes the foreground color. Areas that aren't colored appear in gray. You will probably want to do some experimenting to find the right colors.

Figure 10.13 shows the Chalk & Charcoal dialog box, which controls how this filter works. In it you can set amounts for the chalk and charcoal areas. These sliders have a range from 0 to 20. Start somewhere in the middle and adjust until you get a combination that works for your picture. The Stroke Pressure varies from 0 to 5. Unless you want the picture to turn into areas of flat color, keep the setting at 1 or 2. Intensity builds up rather fast with this filter.

The Smudge tool works nicely with chalk and charcoal. Use it exactly as you would use your finger or hand on paper to soften a line or blend two colors. Photoshop's Blur and Sharpen tools can also be used to define edges or to often a line without smudging it.

Lots to Learn Photoshop CS2 includes over 100 filters! If you master one each week, within two years you'll know them all.

The Charcoal Filter

Use the Charcoal filter (FilterSketchCharcoal) to convert an image to a good imitation of a charcoal drawing. Because charcoal doesn't come in colors, your charcoal drawings will be most successful if you set the foreground to black and the background to white, or to a pale color if you want the effect of drawing on colored paper. The Charcoal filter dialog box is shown in Figure 10.15. You can adjust the thickness of the line from 1 to 7 and the degree of detail from 0 to 5. The Light/Dark Balance setting ranges from 0 to 100 and controls the proportion of foreground to background color.

Figure 10.16 shows before and after versions of a portrait converted into charcoal and lightly retouched with the Brush, Blur, and Sharpen tools. Using a graphics tablet instead of a mouse makes it easier to reproduce the filter's crosshatched lines.