Hi! This is Mama Shan with a video tutorial to show you how to turn a portrait into an oil painting or acrylic painting type of look. Now, the subject matter for this has to be pretty narrow, in that this technique will work best when the subject area is large. It probably would not work so well on landscapes for that type of imagery or where there is a group of people, and there are smaller in the document area, I have to turn that over Marilyn Sholin’s painter site to use her painter with that.

But, for Photoshop, this is a pretty simple technique to apply to a simple portrait, and I am just going to zoom in so you can see the detail of it. And, it works quite nicely, I am just going to use my Spacebar and hand tool, and pen around so you can see the texture of the image. And, I did this in about five minutes, but of course giving you the tutorial, it is probably going take a lot longer than that.

So, anyway, let us get started with this simple technique, I am going to close this out and open up the original image. This, open up your layers palette with your image, and the first thing that we want to do is duplicate the background, so a simple Ctrl+J on a PC, Command J on a Macintosh, and we are just going to apply the basics to this layer directly.

The first thing I am going to do is go to hue and saturation, and I am going to do that directly with a shortcut, Ctrl+U on a PC or Command U on a Macintosh, that opens the hue saturation dialogue box. And, what we apply here will apply itself directly to this layer. You can also find this adjustment under the top image and adjustment’s menu.

The first I am going to do is bump the saturation overall up to about 35--let me just type it in there, and then I am looking at the colors of the image in the subject that I also want to bump a little bit. And, this blue jacket is I want to bump, so I am going to immediately click on the edit master window, and come down to blues, and I am going to bump that up to probably 40 amount of 40.

There is also cyan and blue so I am going to click on the edit window again, and come down to cyan. And, I am going to bump the saturation for this as well to—now, we are getting some nice color, maybe to about 35 as well, so it got saturation amount of +35 in cyan. A plus, make that even +40 in the blues, and then in the master, we have got a +35, and click OK.

And then, I am going to add a clarifying unsharp mask formula to this layer as well. So, go under the top filter menu down to sharpen and over to unsharp mask. When the unsharp mask dialogue box opens up, we are going to swing this amount down to 15 or just type in amount 15, and radius of 85. And, you can remember this because these numbers at up to a hundred, and this is probably a little bit backwards of how you are used to applying unsharp mask but all these does is clarify the image.

I will shut the preview off so you can see, see how it is a little hazy there, and when I click preview, it just kind of sucks on of that haze away, and clarifies the image. And then, I am going to click OK, and I am going to rename this layer just Basic because I have applied my basic colors to this layer, I bumped up my saturation.

I am going to duplicate the basic layer, so again, Ctrl+J on a PC with that layer highlighted or Command J on a Macintosh, and that will give a basic copy. Now, to this layer, we are going to apply a surface blur, and you will need to have Photoshop CS2 or CS3 or above to apply this filter, because it does not exist in version prior to CS2. So, I am going to go under the filter menu, and go to blur, and down at bottom surface blur.

When this dialogue box opens up, what you want to do is probably is zoom in on the image a little bit, and you can do that while the dialogue box is open by pressing Control plus on a PC, or Command plus on a Macintosh. So, while that dialogue is open, we can still look at our main document window, and press the Spacebar and click down on your mouse to drag, and look at the key areas of the subject, which is around the face and the eyes in this type of