Painterly

For my wife's birthday I gave her the gift of a photo session. The catch was it was just a photo session with me not a professional photographer, (SHAMELESS PLUG ALERT) like Garrett Ross. Garrett photographed our wedding, and did Laura's maternity photos and my son's newborn photos... we really like his work.

Back to the photos I took. Laura came to me with a Mary Cassatt image and said she wanted this. I believe she was talking more of the spirit of the image, a mother and her baby, but I decided to try to make the images a little more painterly. I am not trying to recreate Cassatt's style just give the images a little bit of a painted look. That being said here are two versions of the same image with slightly different effects. Really the second one just has one extra effect the first doesn’t have.

I found a tutorial on painterly effects in Photoshop in where you duplicate the image change its blend mode, I used soft light, and apply a motion blur at 90 degrees and crank the distance way up to the three or four hundreds. Then you repeat this two more times. On one you change the angle to -45 degrees and the other to 45 degrees play around with the distance for both. If you turn the first duplicate layer to a smart object and then duplicate that in makes it a little faster.

For the second image I also duplicated the original layer again changed its blend mode to overlay and inverted it and then applied a Gaussian blur filter cranked all the way up. I found this trick in a tutorial for increasing contrast in an image. Once you invert the image the blur filter is actually sharpening the image. So I am blurring the image with three layers and then resharpening it with a fourth. Might be a little counter intuitive but it brightened the image up a little.