snap art tutorial #1, how to soften impasto
Theory: Slapping a photo into Snap Art is a good place to start. However, through trial and error, the use of layers/lighting, and Exposure, some interesting results can be achieved.
Objective: To create a floral piece that looks as though it were created on distressed canvas, is very old, and which simulates the gamut of wet on wet based oil painting when printed onto fine art paper, canvas, or watercolor paper.
Begin:
I should start by saying that I have always been
jealous of Katrin Eisman and her inherent ability
to seamlessly montage images and provide overlays
that add depth and meaning to her pieces. There are
numerous others on the web who have mastered these
compositing techniques and their experience is
vast. However, with Snap Art and Exposure, what
used to take hours of compositing and layering for
these masters can be imitated in a few simple
steps. The stock PS filters for things like
watercolor and paint daubs are all well and good
for adding some sense of invisible digital wizardry
to plain jane photos, but Snap Art really does take
it one step further as you will see in this simple
demonstration. Now, we luddites can get in on some
of the action these PS wizards have been using
against us, and truth be told, its not that hard.
A floral with an isolated subject provides a good
exposition of this technique.
Fig. 1: Here is an unretouched digital image.
In this case, a ghost orchid, which happens to lend
itself nicely to our needs... to create a fine art
masterpiece in as few steps as possible.
Fig. 2: Here is the same image after being
applied the standard Impasto, with settings below,
everything else set to stock.
Fig 3: The Impasto settings, you can obviously
experiment with these to your liking, but I kinda
liked the effect these stock numbers produced. All
the other tabs are default.
Fig 4: Since my preference is for softer, more
nebulous images, I dragged the Impasto layer
onto a new layer above my original photos,
set the opacity to 60%, and then set the layer mode
to "Difference" in order to soften and darken
things a little more.
Fig. 5: The layer stack looks like this.
Fig. 6: And the history stack looks like this
(ignore the snapshot).
Now, for many, the
image might be far enough along to be a nice fine
art piece. However I wanted to darken, add noise,
and increase the red channel slightly to more
imitate the gamut and feel of a canvas. This meant
I handed off to Exposure and added a GAF-500 Warm
pass.
Fig. 7: Here is the final piece after two
passes through GAF-500 and then flattened. I find
that Exposure + Snap Art to be a very powerful
combination.
I hope this tutorial helps some of you generate
ideas for your photographic compositions. As a
photographer, I basically use Snap Art to mellow
out some of my really crisp photos so that the
composition looks warm, faded, on textured paper,
and hand colored/painted. This plug-in has helped
me achieve this with really nice results, and I
wanted to reinforce that with Snap Art + Exposure
together, there are almost limitless expressions
available for a single piece.