Photo Effects: Instant Photo To Oil Painting Action

Step 11: Desaturate The Layer

We need to quickly desaturate the colors from this layer, leaving it black and white. We could do this the "getting paid by the hour" way by going up to the Image menu at the top of the screen, selecting Adjustments, and then selecting Desaturate, but that takes too long. Let's use the faster keyboard shortcut Shift+Ctrl+U (Win) / Shift+Command+U (Mac). Here's my image with "Layer 1" desaturated:

Step 12: Change The Blend Mode Of The New Layer To "Overlay"

We need to change the blend mode of this desaturated layer from it's default of "Normal" to "Overlay". To do that, with "Layer 1" selected, go up to the top of the Layers palette and click on the down-pointing arrow directly to the right of the word "Normal", which brings up a drop-down list of available blend modes. Choose Overlay from the list:

And here's how the image looks now: