A wild way to recover detail in Artistic Portrait Work

During the Topaz Labs Webinar on Tuesday I showed some techniques for making an artistic portrait.  I must say that I had the most fun during that webinar than many in the past few months.  I think it was nice to stray from my usual workflow and do something out of my normal element.

During the Artistic Portrait Webinar I showed several things:

  1. How to make a light appear under the threads of a shirt
  2. How to increase Tone and Color with Topaz Clarity
  3. How to do a Frequency Separation technique with Topaz Detail
  4. How to make interesting painted portraits using 2 Impression layers
  5. How to give the image a radiant glow with Topaz Glow
  6. How to retain all of the original detail in the photograph and apply it to the Artistic Portrait
  7. How to use Texture Effects to blend interesting backgrounds with the foreground

In this tutorial today I will focus strongly on item #6.  I only had about 2 minutes to show this final step during the webinar so I wanted to touch on it in greater detail today.  It is a powerful technique for Artistic Portraits but you can also use it for Landscape images that have been given the artistic painted appearance.

Go to Topaz Labs

Artistic Portraits Exxample

The basic premise is to make a High Pass texture sandwich:

  1. Save your base layer
  2. Duplicate the base layer
  3. Run a filter (I used Impression here) on the duplicate
  4. Duplicate your base layer again
  5. Move it to the top of the layers palette
  6. Change the blend mode to Linear Light
  7. Desaturate the Linear Light layer (CTRL+SHIFT+U, or CMD+Shift+U on Mac)
  8. Go to Filter – Other – High Pass
  9. Set the pixels to 3.0
  10. Adjust the Opacity to taste
  11. Mask out any unwanted detail effect

If you are more of a video person you can watch it all right here!  Enjoy!

 

 

Blake Rudis
f.64 Academy and f.64 Elite are the brainchildren of Blake Rudis. While he is a landscape photographer, he is most passionate about post-processing images in Photoshop and mentoring others.

For Blake, it's all about the art and process synergy. He dives deep into complex topics and makes them easy to understand through his outside-the-box thinking so that you can use these tricks in your workflow today!
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