Make an impression with brushed borders

Jon Adams explains how to turn photos into painterly Impressionist-style masterpieces in Photoshop and then how to add an artistic edge effect

- Jon Adams

There are several ways to turn a photo into an image that looks like an Impressionist painting. These extend from creative shooting techniques that use intentional camera movement to more obvious digital manipulation when processing the picture. We’re focusing on the latter here, with a technique that’s not only quick and easy to apply, but also one that doesn’t use any stock paint effects from Photoshop’s Filter Gallery. This method can also be changed in all kinds of subtle ways to get a huge variety of different looks.

This project involves starting with a single base image, but you then blend that image with multiple copies of itself, each of which is shifted and blurred to break up the continuity of the edges, until you achieve the painterly effect we’re after.

To round off the image, we’re adding a hand-painted border, and we have 20 of these for you to choose from in this issue’s download (see link on left). Just look in the Gifts folder.

ABOUT YOUR BRUSHED BORDER FILES The brushed borders in this issue’s download (see link on opposite page, bottom-left) are all scans of hand-painted effects sized to A4, but they can be easily enlarged or reduced using Free Transform to work with any picture size. They are simple to apply to any image – so if you want to add a border to a regular shot without any of the Impressionist steps, simply go straight to Steps 3 and 4.