How to Turn a Photograph into a Realistic Oil Painting for High Quality Prints
If you have a digital photo and you want it to look like a real, canvas oil painting that you can print and frame, this tutorial is for you. You will need a digital photo that is preferably high resolution, and GIMP photo editing software. The software is free and can be used on Linux and Windows.
Step 1: Download and install GIMP onto your computer. It is free, and doesn't take long to install.
Step 2: Start up GIMP and open the photo you want to turn into a painting. The first thing to do is navigate to Colors > Hue/Saturation. Turn the saturation up about 50%. This will increase the colors to a bright level, and make the 'painting' look better.
Step 3: Navigate to Filters > Artistic > Canvas. We're going to create a a small canvas before applying to painting effect. Choose '1' as the canvas depth and click OK. Wait for it to render.
Step 4: Now, navigate back to Filters > Artistic > Oilfy. In the box that appears, choose a low mask and high evolution for portrait photos, or high mask and lower evolution for landscapes. It will mostly depend on the effect you personally want. However, to preserve delicate details, the mask will have to stay lower than the evolution.
Click OK.
Step 5: You'll notice that now that the painting effect has been put in place, it has blended in with the canvas. This created a new, more authentic effect. Now, we're going to apply another canvas to make it seem as it if was painted onto canvas.
Navigate to Filters > Artistic > Canvas and apply a canvas with a depth of '2'. It will look like a canvas. If the canvas looks a bit to smooth and sharp, apply a blur of '1', just enough to sand it down.
Step 6: Save your image as a high-quality shot. Do this by choosing ctrl+s. The ideal method would be to save it uncompressed so that you maintain perfect quality. However, that will take a lot of drive space. If you need to keep the file size small, but you want the photo to stay as high in quality as possible, save it as a .tif file. Use JPEG compression when it asks. This will lower the file size while keeping the quality higher.
Published by Blair Mathis
Blair is a fulltime freelance writer who specializes in travel and technology writing. Having worked for both private and corporate clients, Blair has experience working to meet a wide range of requirements... View profile
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1 Comments
Post a Commentif your picture isn't big enough for the size painting you want to make, it can still be doable. A painting has brush strokes and texture, it doesn't have the level of detail that a photo does.
In order to get a good big painting from a relatively small photo, enlarge the photo FIRST. It will be pixellated, but don't worry about it. Then follow the steps in this tutorial and it will blur away the pixellation. You can use this technique to make large wall paintings from average sized photos.