Arthur, Smudge Painted

I tried to follow the tutorial, but I have no idea how to use history snapshots. Seems like a good thing to know, but I didn't have time right now to try to learn that too, so I did it without that. It prolly needs more work but I am out of time!

I also posted it to Betterphoto.com, along with the originals, if you care to see them.

Smudge tool Tutorial “simplified” by Mary (after some of the others.)

I can tell you how to do smudge tool painting on Photoshop--it is easy but time consuming.

1)take a photo that you would like to transform into a "painting"--choose one that will look nice when painted and is not too complicated.

2)Make all the adjustments necessary to make it look as good as possible--increase the contrast and saturation a little, and sharpen it. If you need help with this, let me know.

3)increase the size of the picture if necessary. Also, adding some noise makes the brush strokes more visible but takes more time to clean up afterwards. Let me know if you need help with these steps.

4)Then, using the smudge tool, set at a brush size of 10 (or whatever works) and a strength of 40, brush as if you were painting the picture. To make it look right, you have to do the whole picture which takes a LONG time.

You can set the brush to darken or lighten to emphasize various parts and make them show up better and change the brush size to fit smaller or larger areas.

NOTE: The one with my name on it at the top is the more recent of the two images. I've done a lot more work on it, but that work in primarily visible only in the larger image (when you click on it.) If you look carefully, you will see I have smudged away all the pixels --assuming it uploaded correctly.