Make a Painting on Canvas from a Picture

Photoshop has all the tools to turn any picture into a painting which minutes. No special tools are required, just a few simple filters and blending modes. Take a look at these before-and-after pictures:

Looks quite good, isn't it? Read on:

1. As always, first step is to find yourself a nice source picture and open it in Photoshop. I took this calendar-picture from Rachel Steevens to work with:

2. Let's start with the filters. First, make the image blurry: filter>blur>gaussian blur>2,4

Then apply the filter>artistic>paint daubs with these values: brush size=8, sharpness=7 and brush type=simple.

3. Make a copy of the layer by choosing layer>duplicate layer from the menu.

Now apply the same filter>paint doubts with other settings: brush size=25.

Set the blending mode of this layer to "soft light" and the opacity at 50%.

4. It isn't actually necessary, but I added a layer filled with the color 463B44 and blending mode set to "color" with opacity at 50% to give it a special touch.

At this moment you should have something like this:

Which looks already "painted", but to finish it off, we're going to overlay an actual canvas-texture. I found a high-res one here.

Place this image on top of the other layers, set blending mode to "overlay" and opacity to 30%.

Now it should look fine!