Sometimes when stock Photoshop filters fail to please, a little tweaking is all it takes.Sometimes when stock Photoshop filters fail to please, a little tweaking is all it takes.

The real watercolor filter in Photoshop 6 didn’t have the effect I was looking for when I tried to use it, and quite accidently I stumbled across this great technique for the “washed out” paint effect while playing with some other filters.

Take a look at this picture before and after, where I ran the “Filter >Artistic >Watercolor” menu command on:

Before

After Stock Photoshop 6 Filter

Leaves a lot to be desired for, doesn’t it 🙁

But just follow this tutorial, and you’ll have a masterpiece in no time!

Three Easy Steps

1. Open up your image in Photoshop and duplicate the layer by left-clicking on the layer in the layers palette, and dragging it into the “Create New Layer” button.

2. Now make sure the duplicate layer is activated, and select the “Filter >Sketch >Reticulation” menu command. Select the values as shown below:

As you can see below, this causes the image to lose saturation, but make sure that neither end of the grayscale spectrum is too prominent in your picture, e.g. not too much black and not too much white. Since every image is most likely going to be different, try experimenting with the black and white level sliders till you get the reticulation that you want. Leave the density slider at zero, or the image will become texturised.

Grayscale

3. Set the blending mode of the reticulated layer to “Luminosity” and turn down the opacity (I turned mine down to 6\’%) till you get this effect:

Final Product

Comparing this to the first picture and the real watercolor filter, this effect produces a much more realistic and artistic effect!

This effect is useful to use on large background images, as the increase in contrast between skin colors helps to keep the file size to a minimum. Try experimenting with other images to see what suits you best.

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