Hi! This is Mama Shan with another video tutorial. We are going to do another type of watercolor using a different method, and you can open up one of your images or download the girl on beach image, which was graciously provided for by Chris Barrack.
And, the first thing you are going to do is go to File, Save As. And, what we are going to do is rename this, I am just going to click in between the file extension in the name, put an underscore, small letter e1, standing for edit one. And, I am going to change the file format from JPEG to Photoshop because we are going to be creating layers, in that way I know that is an edited file not the original one, and that is just my little short hand. You may have your own way of doing this. So now, we are working, basically on a duplicate image not the original.
Now, the previous methods that I showed you, I had you go in to shadow highlight first to open some of the detail in the shadows. We do not really need to do for this method because the subsequent steps are automatically going to brighten this up. But, actually we want it a little bit on the dark side for this method. And, we are going to go in to the actual artistic watercolor filter so that you can see what that does to the image, and you can make a judgment if you think it looks like a watercolor or not. We are going to use it but we are going to tweak it so that it does look like a watercolor.
The first thing that we are going to do is duplicate our background image and that is a simple Ctrl+J on a PC, Command J on a Macintosh, and we will highlight the duplicate which is now automatically named layer one. And then, go under the filter, artistic down to watercolor and the filter dialogue box will open up, give it a minute to update. And then, I will click the little minus sign in the lower left hand corner so we can get a look in our image, and then if we just move our cursor in to this preview window, click and drag, we can move the image around.
Now, what the watercolor filter does is, it produces of this black area, and this is the shadow intensity, and it is always done with black, I do not know why but it is. So, the first thing that you want to do is take that slider and move it all the way to the left so there is no shadow intensity. And, there is a little bit of black outlining around it, and it gives it a little bit of texture.
And, the next thing you are going to want to do is play with your brush detail settings. Now, I like to push this all the way up and the same thing for the texture, just push that all the way up like this. Now, I am going to zoom in on this because right now, you cannot really tell if it is looking much like a watercolor. But, when you zoom in to 100%, you are getting a more accurate view of how it is rendering those pixels. And so, that looks pretty good, still a little bit dark but we are going to fix that in a second.
So, click OK and we are just going to call this one WC Dark, and then we are going to click on the background layer again and make another duplicate. First, let shut the visibility of the WC dark layer off, click on the background layer, do another Ctrl+J on a PC, Command J on a Macintosh. And this time, we are going to invert the pixels here, and so we can do that by going under image adjustments and down to the Invert Command, which is all the way down here, or just notice the shortcut over here. Ctrl+I on a PC, Command I on a Macintosh.
Now, with this in the inverted state, we are going to go in to the artistic filter again for the watercolor. And this time, we are going to take the shadow intensity up to one and leave the other settings the same, and just click OK. We do not even really need to look at it, and then we are going to invert it back. So, we will just use the shortcut, Ctrl+I on a PC, Command I on a Macintosh, and that inverts this image. And, I am just going to zoom on this by pressing my Spacebar and Control key on a PC, Spacebar Command key on a Macintosh that toggles the zoom tool. It allows me to zoom in. And, you can see that by inverting it first, it gives you much brighter rendering of that image.
So now, what we are going to do is we are going to turn our WC Dark layer on and we are going to call this one WC Light. And, from the layers palette, we are going to reposition or restack this light layer and move it on top of the dark layer. And then, we are going to change its blending mode for normal to screen. So, you can see how this automatically brightens it, we did not need to do any kind of brightening adjustment like we did in the previous method, because of the steps changing. This layer to screen mode is going to interact with the underline pixels to brighten it, and this produces a pretty nice watercolor.
Now, we are going to do another step here, and I am going to shut the visibility off for the WC Dark layer and the WC Light layer, and click back on the background layer and make another duplicate of this. What we are going to do here is make some pencil lines. And so, with the background copy layer highlighted, we just did another Ctrl+G. We are going to go into another filter, and it is under the sketch subtitle here. And, we are going to go down to where it says, Photocopy. And, make sure when you go to this particular filter that you have black as your foreground color and white as your background color. This is important, so with black in foreground position and white in the background, we are going to sketch and photocopy. And, when this dialogue box opens up, I am going to hit the minus sign, and we are going to tweak these settings.
Now, if we go all the way over here, we can see that produces more of a sketchy type effect. We just want lines, so we want to bring that detail back to where it just looks like little pencils outlines. And, you do not want it too dark because that is going to look like ink, so we want it just to where it is kind of light like this, and click OK, and then we are just going to title this Sketch Lines.
And, we are going to turn other layers visibilities back on, and we are going to reposition or restack the sketch lines to the very top, and change its blending mode from normal to multiply. And so, you can see that it brings in that little pencil detail and you might want to make it a little more subtle by lowering the opacity.
In the next part, we will add texture.
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