Trying something new for me, did it work?

I was wanting to create a painted look for a series of images of flowers. A project that I am working on.

Does this work or do I need to go further? Please help.

IMHO, no. Generally, overall, it doesn't really have a painted look. It's more like something headed in the direction of grunge. Also, some of the petals and stems (like the stems in the middle/bottom which seems to be the POF), have very hard edges - almost as if outlined with an edge effect. With painting, normally edges, shadows, lines, and textures would be softened, not enhanced / hardened. Hope this honest evaluation helped.

It depends on how much like a painting you want to make it look. To me it needs to be taken further as it still looks too much like a photo and not enough like a painting.

Also a question to ask yourself is what kind of painting look are you going for, watercolour or oil painting? Each has a distinctly different look.

Edit: i notice you have photo editing ok, hope you don't mind. Here's a quick edit taken several steps further into watercolour territory. Maybe taken too far for the effect you're looking for but you can see immediately the difference between hard edges and detail etc. A potential problem is that the rear flowers tend to blend in with the background.

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If you hadn't introduced it, I would have never thought "painting".

I think the background looks painted, but the flowers still look a too crisp to look like painted. Colors are super nice and vibrant!

Thanks all, that's exactly what I was looking for. It was late last night when I did it, so I wasn't sure if I had gone too far or not enough. Honest evaluation for me is always best. I asked and you guys answered and I appriciate it a lot.

DaveH, thanks! That's cool what you did. And probably the direction I was wanting to go without going that far. Your edit looks more like what I was trying for without using those "paint" tools in PS.

I'll try again later today when I get home from work.

Again, thanks for the help.

cubangixxer wrote in post #10195057
I think the background looks painted, but the flowers still look a too crisp to look like painted. Colors are super nice and vibrant!

Yeah, that's what I thought too, but a lot of that was just super creamy bokeh of the original image. It was shot using my new 85mm f1.8 @ about f2.2, so that cool OOF BG is easy to make look like a painting.

Thanks!

Just FYI.. I use a program called ACDSee Pro 3 to manage my photos primarily because it is a very fast tool for organizing and browsing RAW images. It does provide editing features that I normally do not use for Raw files; but the editor does have some impressive, easy to use effects: oil painting, water color, pencil, crayon....

You can try a 30 day trial for free: http://www.google.com …sTQVKHHLb4Jjxze​ozszaONVGQ

And, for what you get, at $170, it is a bargain.

I used Topaz Simplify for the above edit, easy to use and great for arty effects.

Thanks for the heads up moth, I'll tyake a look at that once I get home. Viewing off my BlackBerry today.

I have not used this feature very much.. but here is one picture I tried to make look like an oil painting using ACDSee Pro3. As I recall, I didn't spend more than about 10 minutes editing it. By no means a good picture, but I was having fun.

Hmmmmm... I bet it could look even better yet with some more time with that program. Very interesting though. Thanks!

Alright, here's another run at my "painted" look image.
Better? Suggestions?

the new cs5 has a brush for making paintings.. better than any filter.. try that out for size!

Looking better

Hmm, did you download the trial and install it? I'm only running PSE7 and the Topaz software suite works fine.