It has a huge range of different painting presets already loaded and you can tweak EVERYTHING – brush size and shape, direction, color, light contrast, add a vignette, and so on. My favorite painting plugin is Impression by Topaz Studio. Some will work as standalone programs, but many are only accessible from within Photoshop. Plugins are separate programs that work within Photoshop to fulfill an additional requirement. An action can be used over and over again and does provide some variety in the results. Once created you can tweak and edit many components to add your personal flourish if you want. The best Photoshop Action artist I know is sevenstyles, and he has an amazing library of effects available, including a Watercolor option. A bit of manual intervention at the beginning sets it up, click Play on the Action and it runs and does its thing. It can take a few goes to get it looking really watercolor, and tweaking the brush opacity up and down helps.Īctions are where someone has recorded all the steps necessary to make the desired outcome in Photoshop for you. Working on the white layer, tap with your water color brush to reveal the image below. Load up your image, add a new white layer on top of the image.

Also required are some watercolor brushes (these can be found free online or good quality ones can be purchased). This is a fairly simple option, but you do need to know how to use layers and how to apply a mask. But you need to have Photoshop or similar installed to use these options. Options using PhotoshopĪctually most photo editing programs that support layers and masks will work here (Elements, Paint Shop Pro etc.). In this third image, I took the second image with painterly effect into Waterlili, and then blended the two in iColorama for this final image. It also has an built-in mask effect for adding some uniqueness to your image. Waterlili turns your image into a watercolor and allows you to tweak color, contrast and saturation. They have a realistic effect and enough capability to allow you to tweak them and get some variety with your final efforts. I have an iPad for doing creative work and there are a couple of specific Watercolor Apps that I like. Let’s start with the easy options and go from there. Some are surprisingly easy and yet effective, and some are a lot more complicated. There are many different ways to achieve a watercolor effect. Note: This isn’t a How To article, this is us dipping our toe into the water to see what the options are – some are quite complicated and probably need Photoshop (or similar). You don’t need Photoshop nor do you always need to spend heaps of money on software either. Whether you use a PC, Laptop, tablet or phone, there is something available. There are many ways to edit your images with a painterly style, for this article we are going to focus on the possibilities on offer to make your images look like watercolor art. Image of my cat Cognac created in Waterlili.

Review jixipix watercolor studio