Paint from a photo in CS5

Photoshop CS5 offers the digital artist amazing new painting capabilities in the Mixer Brush. This allows you to work as if you were using ‘real’ paints, with options to decide how the paint is applied to the canvas. However, one very exciting part of this new brush engine is that fact that it’s now far easier to paint a photo – essentially picking all the colour, detail and form from the photo and overlaying a painted effect. This is perfect for anyone who isn’t that comfortable with painting from scratch and you don’t even need a graphics tablet. In this walkthrough we show to paint over a photo, using nothing more than the new brushes and a mouse for control. If you’d like to follow along, click here for our start file.

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Step 1

Colour boost
Open up your photo in Photoshop CS5. It’s a good idea to add more oomph to the colours in a photo – we used the HDR Toning function to do just this.
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Step 2

New layer

We’re going to work on a new layer. Click the new Layer icon in the Layers palette and rename it Painting layer.

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Step 3

Mixer Brush
Go over to the toolbar and pick the Mixer Brush. It’s grouped with the familiar paintbrush if you can’t immediately see it. One great feature of the Mixer Brush is the brush preview window. As you paint, this preview changes to show you the position of the brush and help you visualise the effect you will get. You can minimise it, or close it altogether if you find it too distracting.
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Step 4

Bristle Qualities
We’ve shrunk our brush preview for now. To pick a brush, open up the Brush palette and you’ll notice a new array of brushes that all look very similar to the kind of brushes you would find in an art shop. These bushes also have a new section in the Brush palette – the Bristle Qualities area. This allows you to alter bristle settings to get the precise effect you want. You can see how the brush stroke will look in the bottom preview window.

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Step 5

Preset options

Once you have picked a brush, you have a few preset options for how the paint behaves with the canvas. These are in the Brush Combinations menu, found in the options bar. The Dry options are suitable for pastel images, the Wet options are great for watercolours and the Moist options are good for oil or acrylic effects.

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