Learn how to transform your favorite portrait photographs into beautiful paintings using Corel Painter and Adobe Photoshop in this Painting with Pixels - Portrait Painting for Photographers training DVD-ROM. Your guide, Jane Conner-ziser, is one of the world's most respected and experienced portrait retouching and painting artists. Step by step, she will lead you from image selection to printing and teach you fine art principles that you can apply to the paintings you create later on. Discover how to be creative while you produce portraits that really sell.
Beyond the creative, Jane will also show you how to customize the Photoshop and Painter workspaces and set up preferences to make your artwork smooth and efficient. Additionally, she will teach you how to make your own brush categories and custom brushes, so you can move beyond the basics and leverage the advanced capabilities of these programs to achieve desired results. As a bonus, the purchase of this DVD gives you 365 days of online access.
Session 01: Workspace Set up in Photoshop
Load Jane's special retouching brushes and create a unique workspace for retouching and image preparation, in order to turn a photograph into a traditional fine art painting.
Session 02: WACOM Tablet Set Up
Learn how to set up your WACOM tablet and practice using it instead of a mouse. Additionally, learn popular functions to assign to function keys and scroll pads for digital photo painters.
Session 03: Preparing a Portrait Photo to Become a Painting
Rather than fighting the photo, discover how to set up a canvas size, extend an edge, and make special image adjustments to lead yourself gracefully into painting. Apply skin preparations and color enhancements to start the photo on its way. Image selection for appropriate painting style and size, as well as resolution and cropping considerations, is addressed.
Session 04: The Eyes Are the Windows to the Soul
Learn Jane's own special techniques for enhancing a subject's eyes in a portrait and moving the eyes more towards the camera.
Session 05: Workspace Set up in Painter
Load Jane's reorganized Painter Library and set up Painter's preferences to make painting fun and easy. Make your own Brush Category so you can organize your favorites and store your own custom-created brushes.
Session 06: Tour of the Brush Library
Dip into some colorful pixels and have fun exploring the many different kinds of brushes available for painting. Learn how to apply, blend, distort, and move paint so you can start controlling your hand while you gain experience with Brush Categories and Variants. See the Brush Creator for more experimentation options, and learn how to restore a Brush Variant to its original settings.
Session 07: Clones, Quick Clones, Tracing Paper and More!
Pick up the most popular keyboard shortcuts and discover how to set up a canvas for painting.
Session 08: The Initial Composition
You're ready to go. The image has been selected, retouched, and enhanced, and now it's time to make the first brush strokes. Once paint is applied, learn how to extend borders and add accent colors to start moving your painting away from the look of a smeared photograph. Make a color set from your image and start adding your own colors to it.
Session 09: The Background Blend
In this session, you will see how to create an "under painting" while you learn how to move your brush (stylus) like a professional fine artist. Pick up classic brush techniques for blending and learn how to sculpt paint into specific shapes.
Session 10: Using Patterns with Paint
Who said we can't use special effects in paintings? Discover how to combine interesting patterns with paint to create fascinating results. Use Painter's Layer Masks to specifically apply the pattern just where you want it - and then turn it into a painting!
Session 11: Polishing Skin Tone
Understand how to produce gorgeous skin tones without losing highlights and shaded sides. Learn about the Five Lights of Nature while you paint, and start seeing yourself enhancing and sculpting with light to give your paintings more depth and dimension.
Session 12: Painting Clothing
Artists use clothing as avenues to add color and motion to their work. Learn how to shape cloth, build highlights and shadows, and rework edges. Use special blenders to add accent colors while working them into the base image, and see how you can shape paint into interesting textures.
Session 13: Painting Hair
Hair offers a wonderful way of creating motion and emotion in paintings. Learn how to see the current direction of hair and work with it to exaggerate the motion.
Session 14: The Second Time Around
Paintings are usually created in three steps: Under Painting, Focal Painting, and Details and Decorations. In this session, you will add your own colors and your own paint to bring interesting additions to your photo painting. Add highlights, accent colors, and base colors for foliage. Save this file as a "Color Clone."
Session 15: Moving On...
Use the "Color Clone" as a reference to blend your additions into your painting. Learn how to use multiple clone sources for complete image control.
Session 16: Painting Foliage
Have fun learning how to exercise creative freedom while you make your own brushes for foliage. Build grass and leaves, blend them into the painting, and combine your texture brushes with other default Painter Brushes to make hand-painted bushes and ground cover. Save your brushes so you can use them often.
Session 17: Painting Clouds
Learn how easy and fun it is to "be the cloud" and apply color that actually becomes a cloud in the sky. Learn how to make some clouds appear far away and others close by.
Session 18: Details and Decorations
The beauty is in the details. In this session, you will learn how to paint the eyes, lips, nose, and eyebrows of a subject to perfection. In addition, you will discover how to accent clothing and bring more focus to the subject. The final step, hand-painted ornaments, is an exercise in painting on layers using transparency locks and special effects.
Session 19: The Signature
It sounds easy, but it's amazing what a challenge coming up with a good signature can be. Learn how to create an artistic, legible signature so you look like an artist but viewers can still read who you are. Learn how to create it in Painter and save it as a custom shape or brush preset in Photoshop, so you can get the full benefit of it.
Session 20: Final Image Adjustments
Finish your painting by evaluating it in Photoshop for color balance and saturation. Learn Jane's "secret weapons" for adding extra ambiance to paintings that can use a little push into the fantasy realm.
Session 21: Printing
This short session discusses what it takes to make a perfect print of your painting on art papers or canvas.