A Classical Portrait Photoshop Painting

For this photo-art tutorial, we have chosen a rather difficult subject, the portrait of a beautiful woman, to put to the test the combinations of Photoshop tools and filters in creating a digital painting in the classical style of Madame X by John Singer Sergeant.

Save a copy of the original photo in the clipboard (Select All and Copy).

Open the Layers Box in the Window Menu. Create a duplicate layer by clicking Command-J (or drag the background to the New Layer Icon)

Set the foreground color in the toolbar to a gray tone (approximately 60% black) and the background color to white.

Click on Filter>Sketch>Chalk and Charcoal

Slide the Charcoal Area ruler to 6

Slide the Chalk Area ruler to 20

Slide the Stroke Pressure ruler to 1

Click on Filter>Brush Strokes>Spatter

Set Spray Radius to 10 and Smoothness to 5. Click OK.

Set the Current Layer to Luminosity in the Layers Palette.

Flatten the Image and save the file under a new name.

Click on Filter>Artistic>Underpainting

Keep the Brush Size at 6

Set the Texture Coverage to 20

Keep the Texture as Canvas

Slide the Scaling to 100%

Slide Relief to 4

In Light Direction choose Bottom Left

Click OK

Set Opacity to 80%

Create a second layer with the original image and set Layer mode to Multiply.

Click on Filter>Sketch>Photocopy

Move the Detail slider all the way to the right to 24

Set Darkness to 2

Click on Image>Adjustment>Selective Color

Drag the sliders until you obtain the desired color scheme. In this particular case these are the parameters:

Red Slider: Cyan 50% / Magenta 0 / Yellow 0 / Black 0
Yellow Slider: Cyan 0 / Magenta 0 / Yellow 0 / Black 50%
Green Slider: Cyan 0 / Magenta 0 / Yellow 0 / Black 0
Cyan Slider: Cyan 0 / Magenta 0 / Yellow 0 / Black 0
Blue Slider: Cyan 0 / Magenta 0 / Yellow 0 / Black 0
Magenta Slider: Cyan 0 / Magenta 0 / Yellow 0 / Black 100%
White Slider: Cyan 50% / Magenta 0 / Yellow / Black 0
Neutral Slider: Cyan 18% / Magenta 0 / Yellow -9% / Black 0
Black Slider: Cyan 0 / Magenta 0 / Yellow 0 / Black 0