Photo Effects: Instant Photo To Oil Painting Action

Summary: Turn a digital photo into an oil painting and then apply the effect to any other photos instantly with your "Instant Photo To Oil Painting" action!

Written by Steve Patterson
Exclusively for Photoshop Essentials.com.

Part of our complete collection of Photo Effects tutorials.

In this Photo Effects tutorial, we're going to take a photo and make it look like an oil painting, which is a popular and fun thing to do with Photoshop.

Problem is, creating the effect requires the use of a few different filters and memorizing the settings for each one, which isn't fun, and it's also a little time consuming, meaning it takes more than five seconds.

To get around that problem, we're going to save our steps as an action. When we're done, not only will we have converted our photo into an oil painting, we'll have a handy "Instant Photo To Oil Painting" action that we can apply to any photo from then on, letting Photoshop do all the work for us! Not only is this a great effect to add to any photo, amateur or professional, but if you happen to be a pro photographer, once you've saved the action, you can charge future clients big time bucks for an effect that you created in the time it took you to press a keyboard shortcut. Not that you would do that, of course. That would just be wrong.

Anyway, here's the original image I'll be using for this tutorial:

And here's the "oil painting" version:

It may look complicated, but as I said, once we're done with this tutorial, you'll be able to instantly convert any photo into an oil painting without having to redo any of the steps we're about to go through. We do have to do them once though, so let's begin.