How to make your photos look like paintings

Firstly, let me just say I don’t think I have ever felt the need to turn one of my photographs into a painting before. I am perfectly happy that my photos look like photos and that my paintings look like an explosion in a paint factory.

That said, when I saw this technique on the Adobe forums I was intrigued by its simplicity and when I tried it I was like ‘OMG’ (yes, I really said that) – and best of all, it is so, so SUPER easy! There are instruction and downloads below for both Photoshop and Lightroom.

PHOTOSHOP METHOD – everything happens within Photoshop’s RAW plugin. This is what you do…

• This works best with images that aren’t too big, so start by downsizing an image to around 1000 pixels wide (or less) and saving as a JPG (this won’t work with very high-res images).
• Now, using Photoshop’s Bridge, select an image and open it in RAW by pressing Ctrl + R.
• Once you’re in the RAW dialogue box, slide the ‘Recovery’ all the way up to 100 and then slide the ‘Contrast’, ‘Vibrance’ and ‘Saturation’ levels so they’re all on 50.
  Looks weird, doesn’t it? Don’t worry, here’s where the magic happens…
• Click the third little square tab (the ‘detail’ tab; it has what looks like two little triangles on it). Turn the ‘Luminance’ up all the way to 100 and the ‘Luminance Detail’ to about 30.
• Ta da!

Here’s everything mentioned above packaged up into a convenient preset so you can load and go…
Painterly – camera raw preset

LIGHTROOM METHOD – this is what you do…

• This works best with images that aren’t too big, so start by downsizing an image to around 1000 pixels wide (or less) and saving as a JPG (this won’t work with very high-res images).
• Now, import this image into Lightroom and open the ‘Develop’ tab.
• In the ‘Basic’ section, slide the ‘Recovery’ all the way up to 100 and then slide the ‘Contrast’, ‘Vibrance’ and ‘Saturation’ levels so they’re all on 50.
  Looks weird, doesn’t it? Don’t worry, here’s where the magic happens…
• In the ‘Detail’ section turn the ‘Luminance’ up all the way to 100 and the ‘Detail’ to about 50.
• Ta da!

Here’s everything mentioned above packaged up into a convenient preset so you can load and go…
Painterly – Lightroom preset

You now have all the tools you need to trick family and fiends into believing you’re a bone-fide artiste without the need to spend years at art school or all those messy oils and pastels.

You’re welcome.