Photo Effects: Instant Photo To Oil Painting Action
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Step 1: Create A New Action
Since we only want to have to go through these steps once, we're going to record them all as an action. But before we can do that, we need to create one. Go to your Actions palette (it's grouped in with the History palette) and click on the Create New Action button at the bottom of the palette:
This will bring up the New Action dialog box:
Name the new action "Instant Photo To Oil Painting", or a name of your choosing, as I've circled in red above. To be able to quickly access this action when we're done, I'm giving mine a keyboard shortcut of Shift+Ctrl+F12, again as I've circled above. That would be Shift+Command+F12 on a Mac. You can assign whichever function key you like, and if you want to include the Shift and/or Ctrl key (again, Command on a Mac), click inside the checkbox to the left of their names.
When you're ready, click the Record button and Photoshop will begin recording our steps.
Step 2: Increase The Saturation Of The Image With Hue/Saturation
We want our oil painting to have rich, striking colors, so let's increase the saturation of our image using a Hue/Saturation adjustment. Go up to the Image menu at the top of the screen, select Adjustments, and then select Hue/Saturation, or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+U (Win) / Command+U (Mac). This brings up the Hue/Saturation dialog box:
Click and drag the middle slider bar directly below the word "Saturation" to increase the saturation of the photo around 40-50%. I'm setting mine to 50% as I've circled above. The idea is to increase the color saturation until it looks like you've gone a bit too far. 40-50% should do the trick.
Here's my image so far after increasing the saturation:
We're going to head off into the world of Photoshop's Filter Gallery next.
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