Turn any Photo into a Painting using PhotoShop CS3

There are times when a photo is just a little to bold for a design I am working on. One of my favorite things to do is make a photo look a little more abstract and soft using a few different tools in Photoshop.

Start out with an image of your choice. I will say that photos with lighter backgrounds will come out a little more clean then darker images. For this example I am going to use a picture of some buildings that I found on sxc.hu(free stock images website). I chose this image mostly because it has really defined edges with the windows etc. Once you have your image go ahead and open your image in Photoshop CS3. One of the important things to remember is that when using effects like these play around with the settings. Don't limit your self to the settings that I am using below

The first thing we are going to do is apply a cutout filter by going to Filter-->Artistic-->Cutout. Apply the following settings and click okay.

Cutout Settings
Number of Levels - 3
Edge Simplicity - 2
Eduge Fidelity - 2

You can already see the painted effect taking place and the image is much softer. For some this is just the effect you are looking for but I am still looking to make my image a little more abstract. We are not going to apply another filter called paint Daubs. To apply this filter go to Filter-->Artistic-->Paint Daubs and apply the following settings and click okay.

Paint Daubs Settings
Brush Size - 4
Sharpness - 7
Brush Type - Simple

Now apply the the Rough Pastels filterFilter-->Artistic-->Rough Pastels and apply the following settings and click okay.

Rough Pastels
Stroke Length 12
Stroke Detail 2
Texture - Burplap
Scaling 50%
Relief 4
Light Bottom

That's it you should no have something like the image below