Someone recently asked me online about how to create a painterly and also an artistic effect for bird photographs.

This video is all about these two points…

1. How to simply create a painterly effect

2. How to make it artistic

So, let’s take a look at a quick example of how to achieve both these goals in Photoshop.

I have selected a recent shot from my balcony for this purpose which should be good enough to illustrate the basics of how to achieve this goal.

Okay, so a “Command” or “Control” + “E” would take this image from Lightroom to Photoshop.

Now, as illustrated in earlier videos, we just do a basic cleanup on this image.

First, we duplicate the image which puts it on a layer and we retain a backup in case we need to re-do the process. Command + J is a shortcut for this. Now, we can make the background layer invisible since we do not require it anymore.

A command + 0 fits the image to the window for a better view…

A simple select subject, and mask out the subject. Just use the selection and brush tool to clean up rough edges. Maybe try the colour range selection as well, if needed.

Now, let us see how to simply create the painterly effect.

Select “Stylize” from the “Filters” menu and choose “Oil paint”. Feel free to play around with the settings in this dialog box.

You can always use the help built into Photoshop to find out more about the settings in this dialog and what each option does.

Once you are done with that, just press “Enter” or click “OK” and we have our “painterly” effect.

Now, what about the “artistic” effect?

As it turns out, the person who asked me about this was looking for multiple copies of the same image put together in different sizes.

This is how I went about it…

Just duplicate the layer we already have. Use the “Free Transform” from the “Edit” menu to modify the copied layer. You can make as many copies as you want and pretty much apply any kind of transforms to each.

The art and concept belong totally to you and what you choose to create!

This is just an example that I came up with just to illustrate the concept.

Of course, you can also try to “Oil Paint” one layer at a time to give them all a different artistic look.

That’s it for now…Have fun, till the next one!