Learn Elements Now ... Creating A Work Of Art From A Photograph

If you are like me there has been some point in your life where you have looked at one of your photos and said to yourself, "Wow, that could almost be a painting!" Were you aware that there are digital techniques that you can use to transform your photos into a watercolor or pen and ink painting or charcoal drawing? Once you have transformed them they then can be printed on canvas or fine art watercolor paper for that true art feel and permanence.

Today digital photography methods are closing the gap between "fine art photography" and simply "fine art." In the past it could take a painter days, weeks and months to create paintings or water colors; now this can be done digitally in a few hours. The great thing is that a variety of techniques can be applied to the same image. It all depends on how you want to "interpret" your art work.

Photoshop Elements has many amazing filter tools that only require a little bit of time and experimentation in order to figure out how to use them to enhance your photographs. Adding a bit of "noise" or "Gaussian Blur" to your photograph can do wonders to transform your ordinary photo into a work of art.

The more you practice with Photoshop Elements the more you will become familiar with many of the filter tools that are available to you and you will quickly figure out that you will want to apply different tools to different parts of your image. An easy way to do this is to choose an area of your photograph that you wish to apply a filter to and "cut it" from the main photo then copy it into a new folder. Once you have done this step you can work on each part of the image independently from the others. Finally, once you have finished adding your filters and effects to the parts you have cut away you can easily copy them back into the original image and relocate it to the proper position. It literally "snaps" into place when you line it up with where it needs to be.

I recommend playing with all the Photoshop Elements "Effects" tools to see what they can do with your image. It is also fun, when you have created some masterpieces, to try changing them into black and white or keeping portions of your image as black and white while making others color. You should see a "painted effect" on the color portion.

Another interesting fact of transforming these photographs in this way is that you are literally altering the pixels of the image. This allows you to enlarge the image far greater without the image resolution loss that you would experience with a normal photo. For example, we have applied some techniques to an image taken on an 8 megapixel digital camera and have then printed that image at 30 x 40 inches on canvas and it is stunning...and it can easily go larger.

By: DavidPeters

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