Editing an Image of My Daughter

[TheFamilyMan]

Hi Photoshop Gurus,

I'm a bit of a Photoshop newbie, and I feel like an ass to ask for help on my first post on a forum. With that said I'm looking to edit a picture of my daughter similarly to the one below, lol. I am referring to the watercolor transition where the green and white collide in the picture below. I have an image of her, that I want to add text to, and I want the border/transition between the text area and the image to look like the picture below.

It doesn't seem terribly difficult, but I don't know how to do it. Guidance would be greatly appreciated. If you know of a tutorial online, please link to that. Or maybe there is just some jargon that I am ignorant of, that would make a big difference in carrying on my own research.

Thank you!

 

[Tom Mann]

Have u tried using Photoshop's brushes to produce that dappled look? These are best driven using a Wacom or similar tablet, & some brushes are even specifically labeled as for watercolor effects.

Another option would be to use an existing watercolor painting: scan it, tweak as needed for use as a background for your photo.

HTH,

Tom M

 

[JC it]

Hello,

Newbie here on the forums, just saw this post and thought I could help, I will say hello in the new member area, it's just am really pressed for time right now.
So with that said, what Tom Mann as mentioned, I have done just that but keep in mind I did this real quick, I could have chosen a better brush and I did use
a Wacom tablet. I also softened the edges of the brush using alt+right click. I purposely went over the top edges of the book to show the effect. Anyway, hope this helps.

 

[IamSam]

Hello FM and welcome to PSG.

The first thing you need to do is to check out some Photoshop Watercolor Painting techniques

Get yourself some watercolor brushes.

I did the following really fast so it's not perfect.
Here is a photo of a daughter.


I then duplicated her image.

I then created a new layer below the duplicate and filled it with white.

Add a layer mask to the duplicate. Highlight the layer mask.
I then used one of the WC brushes set to black to remove a section.


I added 2 new layers above the white layer and below the duplicate. These will be the watercolor layers.

On the first, I set up one of the WC brushes Shape Dynamics so that the brush would change size and rotate.
I lowered the WC brushes opacity to 75%.
I sample colors from the duplicate image and made brush strokes around the masked edge.


I moved to the next WC layer.
Lowered the WC brushes opacity to 50% (or less)
Again, sampling colors from the image itself, I made more brush strokes on the masked edge.


You could blur the WC layers.
Here is the layers panel.


This makes a fairly convincing WC transition. You take your time and do it right!

 

[TheFamilyMan]

Thanks for taking the time to share your ideas. It's greatly appreciated. I'm going to see if I can imitate what Sam has shared.

Update:

Spent some time on it. I've learned a lot, but I haven't achieved the rough edge you have in the first edited photo Sam. Maybe I need to try some different brushes. I downloaded these ones: http://www.brusheezy.com/brushes/2772-watercolor-splatters. Not sure if I need new brushes or just need to muck around some more. Hopefully I'll have the chance to work on it tomorrow.

 

[Tom Mann]

Another closely related technique that is occasionally useful is to modify the background to make it look more like a watercolor. Then develop a layer mask from it to transition between the background and the clear area for text. The advantage of this is that the texture in the transition area looks very similar to the texture of the remaining background.

Using the example Sam provided, the background in that image has what is commonly called "nervous bokeh" -- it doesn't look anything like a water color painting. Here's his original, the only differences being that I converted the image from his monitor's color space (...that's what most screen grabs give) to sRGB and very slightly tweaked the skin color:




Next, I applied some water color painting like effects almost entirely to the background:



Here is the layer mask I developed from the previous image:



And then used it to transition to a white area in the URHC and added some sample text:



This technique looks more like a transition in film to an overexposed sunny area than brushwork, but as usual, there is always more than one way to get close to a particular look in PS. Also, there is nothing stopping one from applying watercolor brush work on top of the mask I used for a hybrid effect.

Cheers,

Tom M