Steve Jobs: a salt painting. WOW!
Tagged: painting
Turn your image into a beautiful work of art with Snap Art
Alien Skin Software released Snap Art 3 a while back, and I’ve been playing with it for a while now and found it to be yet another excellent Photoshop add-on from my favorite plug-in maker.
Snap Art 3 is definitely made for photographers, but designers can make use of it as well. It’s easy to use, highly flexible, and at $199 it’s affordable for what it does. Not only do the multitude of effects work on photos, but you can apply Snap Art filters to videos imported into Adobe Photoshop Extended as well.
Snap Art turns your images into works of art
I won’t bother to go into all the filters and features, you can check them out on the Snap Art examples page. But know that Snap Art now offers a Detail Mask feature that allows you to adjust the details in specific areas of your images. Very slick! All of Snap Art’s oil paint, watercolor, pencil, charcoal, comic art, and dozens of other filters, offer non-destructive editing. And experimenting is easy with the large preview window.
Snap Art 3 works with Photoshop CS4 or later, Lightroom 2 or later, and Photoshop Elements 8 or later, on a Mac running OS X 10.5 or newer, including in 64-bit mode. A downloadable demo of Snap Art 3 is available.
750,000 Photoshop layers, 6.5GB file size, 4 years to create
Bert Monroy's massive Times Square Photoshop painting
Those are some hefty numbers for a Photoshop document. Bert Monroy has made his previous 15,000 layer Photoshop file that took 11 months to create pale in comparison.
Bert’s latest digital painting, titled Times Square, is a 300×60 inch, 6.5 GB flattened Photoshop file features Adobe Photoshop founders John and Thomas Knoll standing in the main foreground, surrounded by digital imaging experts such as Russell Brown and Jeff Schewe.
Here are a few more stats of the image:
- The image size is 60 inches by 300 inches.
- The flattened file weighs in at 6.52 Gigabytes.
- It took four years to create.
- The painting is comprised of almost 3,000 individual Photoshop and Illustrator files.
- Taking a cumulative total of all the files, the overall image contains over 500,000 layers.
The Photoshop file on the site can be zoomed using Photoshop’s Zoomify tool, which allows you a close-up view of all the details in the image, and they are amazing!
Painting color onto a grayscale image
Adding color to a grayscale image is a great effect that offers a lot of visual impact with little effort. Many digital cameras can actually do it automatically. But the results are often less than optimal. Lesa Snider at The Graphic Reporter wrote a brief tutorial a few years ago that illustrates this simple technique that creates a central point of interest in your image. The tutorial involves the use of layers and layer blending modes, as well as the brush tool. Once you master the effect doing it as described in the tutorial, you can move on to using Masks and Channels for more accurate results. One bit of advice though, less is more. In other words, pick and choose the areas of your image you want to draw attention to the most. Colorizing most of the image defeats the purpose of the effect entirely. In the sample image above, I probably would have left the hat, gloves and purse in grayscale, drawing more attention to the purse. But that’s just my opinion.