The Watercolor filter (choose Filter, Artistic, Watercolor) yields a texture that could be mistaken for a watercolor painting, but it darkens the image much more than most watercolor painters would (see Figure 20.2). A Brush Detail (1–14) slider enables you to control the amount of detail in the resulting image. The Shadow Intensity control (1–10) determines exactly how much the image is darkened. Texture (1–3) enables you to choose a flatter image or one with more visible strokes.

Figure 20.2. I got a decent result with the Watercolor filter, but I had to tweak the lighting in the photo beforehand to make it turn out.

With the Dry Brush filter (choose Filter, Artistic, Dry Brush), you can reproduce the effect of painting with very little paint on the brush (see Figure 20.3). This gives you simple, soft-edged strokes that can maintain more or less image detail, depending on the Brush Detail setting (0–10); you also don’t get the dark, threatening aura that the Watercolor filter gives. Your other options are Brush Size, ranging from 0 to 10, which also has a great deal of influence on the amount of detail retained in the image, and Texture, ranging from 1 to 3. Setting the Texture slider to 3 adds some noise to the image, and setting Texture to 1 keeps the picture noise-free; a setting of 2 falls between those two extremes.

Figure 20.3. You can see how similar this effect is to the Watercolor filter, but without the black splotches.

A real-life spatter technique involves spraying the canvas or paper with droplets of paint by shaking the brush or tapping it against a finger. Photoshop Elements’ Spatter filter (choose Filter, Brush Strokes, Spatter) is similar to a combination of the Diffuse and Ripple filters, making your picture look as though it was created from tiny droplets of paint (see Figure 20.4). The Spatter dialog has only two sliders: Spray Radius, which ranges from 0 to 25 and controls how far droplets of one color are allowed to extend into areas of different colors, and Smoothness, which controls the ripple effect. Setting Smoothness to 1 eliminates the ripples completely; setting it to 15 gives you a picture that’s nearly unrecognizable.

Figure 20.4. It looks a bit strange, but it does look like a painting.

In oil painting, artists often paint a blocky, simplified version of the image they’re going for and then go back and add layers of detail and texture. That’s called underpainting. In Photoshop Elements, the Underpainting filter (choose Filter, Artistic, Underpainting) produces results similar to those of the Median filter, one of the Blur filters you learned about in the last hour (see Figure 20.5). Underpainting blurs your picture into a fairly realistic oil-painted effect. Brush Size (0–40) and Texture Coverage (0–40) sliders enable you to control the brush strokes’ width and how much of the background shows through.

Figure 20.5. If you’re using the Underpainting filter, you’re probably not using it alone; it makes a great color layer under a more detailed image layer.

Meanwhile, you can add a background texture using controls just like those in the Texturizer dialog box. A pop-up menu contains the four basic choices of Brick, Burlap, Canvas, or Sandstone; the Other option enables you to use your own grayscale Photoshop file as a texture map. After choosing a texture, you set the Scaling slider to a value between 50% and 200% to determine the size of the texture relative to the image. You can also specify a Relief value from 0 to 50 that controls how high the dark areas in the texture file appear to be. You can choose a Light Direction, and you can also invert the texture so that it appears to be pressed into the image instead of lying under the picture.

When you’re done applying the Underpainting filter, you can paint the details back in yourself with the Brush tool, or try combining Underpainting with Palette Knife or another artistic filter.

A palette knife is a blunt knife that a painter uses to mix paint colors on a palette. Sometimes artists also use palette knives to actually apply paint to the canvas, for a chunky, highly textured style. The Palette Knife filter (choose Filter, Artistic, Palette Knife) attempts to reproduce this effect, but it doesn’t add the texture that a real palette knife would (see Figure 20.6). You can control Stroke Size (1–50) and Stroke Detail (1–3). The Softness slider (0–10) determines whether the paint strokes blend with one another.

Figure 20.6. With Palette Knife, this delicately detailed image is almost unrecognizable.

I like Paint Daubs a lot, but I have to admit that it works like an oddball combination of other filters, resulting in an effect that looks anything but “daubed.” When you apply Paint Daubs (choose Filter, Artistic, Paint Daubs), you end up with a picture that seems to have been blurred, then filtered with Find Edges, then posterized, and finally sharpened (see Figure 20.7). The filter might be more accurately called Paint Blobs.

Figure 20.7. Here a blob, there a blob ....

You use a Brush Size slider, with values ranging from 1 to 50, to control the size of the posterized color areas. A Sharpness slider (0–40) enables you to apply as much or as little sharpening as you want. The Brush Type pop-up menu offers several choices, including Simple, Light Rough, Dark Rough, Wide Sharp, Wide Blurry, and Sparkle brushes. Rough brushes apply more texture, and the Sparkle brush bumps up the Find Edges effect and increases the picture’s saturation to create neon colors.

Pastels are sticks of solid pigment, the same kind used in liquid paints, that you can draw with like a crayon. They’re easy to blend, and they come in several varieties with slightly different characteristics. The Rough Pastels filter (choose Filter, Artistic, Rough Pastels) applies “pastel” strokes in the length of your choice to a picture based on an underlying rough texture (see Figure 20.8); again, you can choose Brick, Burlap, Canvas, or Sandstone from the Texture pop-up menu, or you can choose Other and use your own grayscale Photoshop-format file. As usual with textured backgrounds, you can control the Scaling (50% to 200%), the Relief value (0–50), and the Light. As with the other texture-using filters, you can also check the Invert box to flip the texture so it’s incised into the picture’s surface instead of protruding from it.

Figure 20.8. The key to using Rough Pastels is getting the texture right—not too much, not too little.

The Smudge Stick filter (choose Filter, Artistic, Smudge Stick) is your basic pastels filter, giving you the sort of result you’d get by using soft, smudged pastels in real life (see Figure 20.9). You can determine the length of the smudging strokes with the Stroke Length slider (1–10) and the amount of contrast in the picture with the Intensity slider (also 1–10). Finally, the Highlight Area slider controls just how bright the brightest areas in the picture are, whether they’re just lighter than the rest of the picture or completely blown out to white.

Figure 20.9. This filter would look more realistic if all the strokes weren’t smudged in the same direction.

Charcoal isn’t just for barbecues; it’s a traditional drawing medium that’s often combined with chalk so the artist can produce both dark and light strokes. In Photoshop Elements, the Chalk & Charcoal filter (choose Filter, Sketch, Chalk & Charcoal) combines chalk strokes in the Background color and charcoal strokes in the Foreground color to create an image that can look extremely surreal, depending on your color choices. With the default colors of black and white, however, the filter produces a quite creditable imitation of a drawing made with charcoal and chalk (see Figure 20.10). Using the controls in the dialog, you can control the Chalk Area and the Charcoal Area (both 0–20) and the Stroke Pressure (0–5) to determine how intense the effect is.

Figure 20.10. Not surprisingly, Chalk & Charcoal’s results look much like Smudge Stick’s, only without the color.

Often used on canvas to create a preliminary drawing for a painting, Conté sticks or crayons are made from compressed powdered graphite or charcoal, mixed with wax or clay and formed into square sticks. The Conté Crayon filter produces the effect of a crayon on textured paper (see Figure 20.11); choose Filter, Sketch, Conté Crayon to get there. Conté crayons are usually black, dark red, or brown, so if you’re looking for a realistic crayon effect, you’ll want to use one of these colors as the foreground color and a white, cream, or tan paper color as the background color. The Texture controls will look familiar; they’re just like those from the Texturizer filter and several other artistic filters. The dialog also has sliders for Foreground Level and Background Level. Because it doesn’t have any controls for stroke length or width, Conté Crayon’s results tend to look less believable than those of Chalk & Charcoal; it’s more obvious that the picture started as a photograph.

Figure 20.11. To me, Conté Crayon looks more like an engraving technique than something you’d do with an actual crayon.

Twentieth-century artist Edward Gorey is widely acknowledged to have been one of the all-time masters of pen-and-ink drawing. You can see some of his work on the Web (start with www.lunaea.com/words/gorey/), and I guarantee you’ll enjoy it. Now, I’ve never been able to equal Gorey’s work with the Graphic Pen filter (choose Filter, Sketch, Graphic Pen), but I keep trying (see Figure 20.12). Graphic Pen produces a pen-and-ink sketch effect, with no outlining, just shading strokes. You can control the Stroke Length (1–15) and the Light/Dark Balance (0–100), which determines how much of the image is covered with the Foreground and Background colors, with medium settings distributing the colors evenly. You have four choices for Stroke Direction: Horizontal, Left Diagonal, Right Diagonal, and Vertical.

Figure 20.12. Here’s another filter that leaves our poor flowers nearly unrecognizable; Graphic Pen works best with very high-contrast, low-detail images.

This traditional Japanese art, literally translated “ink painting,” is done with a brush, rice paper, and compressed bamboo charcoal mixed with water to produce black ink. Sumi-e drawings are intended to convey the soul of an object without portraying unnecessary detail. They tend to have a lot of dark areas and soft-edged strokes (see Figure 20.13). Using the Sumi-e filter (choose Filter, Brush Strokes, Sumi-e), you can control the Stroke Width (3–15) and the Stroke Pressure (0 to 15). The Contrast slider (0–40) determines how much the contrast of the original image is bumped up; higher settings increase contrast, and lower ones maintain the existing level of contrast.

Figure 20.13. Traditional sumi-e paintings use only black ink, but Photoshop Elements’ Sumi-e filter retains much of the picture’s color.

With this one, we’re veering away from traditional art and into the modern world. Whether neon signs constitute art is debatable, but the fact that the Glowing Edges filter (choose Filter, Stylize, Glowing Edges) produces neat effects is not. Glowing Edges combines the Find Edges filter and the Invert command (see Figure 20.14), and it gives you the capability to control the Edge Width (1–14), the Edge Brightness (0–20), and the Smoothness of the edges (1–15). With higher Smoothness settings, the filter locates fewer edges.

Figure 20.14. You can’t tell it’s a vase of flowers, but it sure looks neat; this filter is more appropriate for a picture of an object whose shape is its most identifiable feature.

If you painted a picture with a sponge (in theory, at least), it would look like what you get when you apply the Sponge filter (choose Filter, Artistic, Sponge; see Figure 20.15). The Brush Size slider (1–10) controls how large the theoretical sponge is. The Smoothness slider (1–15) enables you to control the blurriness of the sponge strokes’ edges. With the Definition slider, you can make the image darker or closer to the original image; the lowest setting of 1 keeps the colors as is, and the highest setting of 25 darkens them.

Figure 20.15. I can definitely see how this could happen in my house with a sponge and an empty wall.

I’ve always liked to apply filters on top of filters, but this whole process has gotten so much easier since the introduction of the Filter Gallery that it’s hard to know why anyone would stick with just one filter at a time. With an interface much like the Layers palette, the Filter Gallery enables you to stack dozens of filters on top of each other, drag them to change the order in which they’re applied, and hide or show specific filters in the list to see just what effect they’re having on the whole.

I’ve put together a few of my favorite combinations for you. Remember, you can download the picture I used (blossom.jpg) from the book’s website and try your own combinations. All three of the figures in this section are also in the color section, so you can see for yourself how my experiments worked out.

First, I layered Dark Strokes and Water Paper. The latter, another watercolor-type filter, gave the picture a nice dreamy, smudged quality, and Dark Strokes added some weight in the shadows (see Figure 20.16). I kept Dark Strokes on top of the filter pile because when I put it below Water Paper, it added too much dark, heavy detail to the original photo.

Figure 20.16. I think I like this one best of all.

I got a similar but (I think) less attractive result with Poster Edges and Dry Brush. Again, Dry Brush provides the soft color, and Poster Edges provides some depth to the edges of the photo’s objects, particularly the round table top (see Figure 20.17). This image is less dreamy and more stylized.

Figure 20.17. This reminds me of watercolor-and-ink work I’ve seen.

Finally, I applied Accented Edges twice with different settings. The first application of Accented Edges, at the bottom of the filter list in the dialog, had high Edge Brightness and Smoothness values. Then I layered another instance of Accented Edges on top of that, with rougher lines and darker edges. The combination results in abstract, flowing colors that still have plenty of edge definition (see Figure 20.18).

Figure 20.18. I can’t decide if this effect is a picturesque mistiness or just goopy.