Converting Photos to art with Ai in Photoshop

There’s a cool hack that allows you to convert photos to paintings and a lot more using Generative Fill and a 20% selection.

It was a well known hack, but I took it further.  I encourage you to look at the tutorial as it shows a lot of detail and options not in this tutorial. 

This stopped working somewhere with Photoshop 2024. The reason, density was broken in Generative Fill. The good news is, it’s working again in the Main Version of Photoshop (It currently does not work with Photoshop Beta). But there are some new features that work with this trick, that weren’t available before.

Set up Photoshop.

First thing, let’s get our settings right.

Double click the Quick Mask button

This Brings up the options. Choose Selected areas.

Click ok

Converting to a Painting using Quick Mask.

Let’s do an overall adjustment. We will start with Quick mask. If you can, read or watch ENTIRE tutorial. There is important info I don’t want you to miss and we are covering multiple techniques, it’s important for you to see it all.

Open your picture.

Choose Quick Mask. Q key

Click on Foreground Color.

Choose the (B) Option, this is Brightness. Enter 80. 80% White will give us 20% Black. This is the Density we are choosing: 20%.

Click OK

Fill with the Foreground color. Option+Delete on Mac, or Alt+Backspace on Windows

You will see a pink color.

Exit Quick Mask mode by tapping the Q key once again.

You probably won’t see the selection, Marching Ants because it’s less than 50% selected and they don’t show up, but the selection is active.

Click on Generative Fill in the Task Bar

Enter Painting (You could use other things, such as sketch, oil painting, watercolor etc.)

Click Generate

You will see we now have an art look over the photo.

Converting a Photo to art with the Selection Brush

Let’s look at the 2nd method, which will work fine for this simple example, but when we need more control later, I’ll point something out to you.

Choose the Selection Brush. Change the Opacity to 20.

Make the brush size really large. (Its the setting to the right of the Opacity.)

Paint over the entire image

Type in Painting to the Generative Fill and press enter.

As you can see, it’s really easy and quick using the Selection Brush, but only for a simple conversion.

Partial Adjustment

Now we are going to do a partial adjustment. We want to change the background to a Watercolor. We will start with the Selection Brush. You need to see what happens to learn something, then we will use the Quick Mask for this example and you will see why its better in this more complex adjustment.

Choose the Selection Brush and choose 20% for opacity and paint over the background.

Lets clean up the edges where we have gone over.

Choose the Subtract option for the brush and a smaller size.

Also increase the Amount to 100% because his is the cleanup brush.

Paint away the edges and clean up the mask.

Type watercolor in the Generative Fill box in the Taskbar.

Click Generate

The result looks good, but..

You may wonder why I didn’t use Select Subject, or any other selection tools to help?

When you use other selections tools, you need to first turn on those tools to make the selection, ok, Captain Obvious.

When you choose the Selection Brush, it converts the selected area into a Mask. Perfect.. BUT..

No matter what you set the Brush Opacity to, an active selection will always be 100% when you click on the Selection Brush. So, only selections painted with the Selection Brush can be a different opacity. Yeah, that sucks.

If you want to use other selections tools, you need to use the Quick Mask. (This is one reason, I’m not a huge fan of the Selection Brush. It’s better to use Quick Masks for anything but the most basic selections with the Selection Brush.

Using Quick Mask to do a Partial Effect

The Good news, its not hard to do this with the Quick Mask, Learn this and you will be set.

The First thing you need to do is ENABLE Quick mask, Either tap the Q key, or click the button in the toolbar.

We can use selections in the Quick Mask mode.

Choose the Object Selection Tool.

Click Select Subject.

It now selects our person.

If select subject can’t find a subject, do this: Open the Channels Panel. Click on RGB at the top. Now use object selection. When the selection is made, click on Quick Mask in the Channels again and continue.

We need to Inverse the selection and choose everything but the Person AKA our Background.

Press Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+I to Inverse (swap) the selection.

Choose a Foreground color.

Under the (B) set it to 80% like we did before.

Click ok.

Fill with Foreground color.  Option+Delete / Alt+Backspace on Windows.

Notice the pink color fills the background, but not our person, because of the selection we made.

Turn off the selection by Pressing The Ctrl/Cmd+D key.

Leave Quick Mask Mode, tap the Q key.

In the task Bar, enter watercolor under Generate

Click Generate and now we have just the background converted to a water color, while our person remains a photo.

For the more complex tasks that require additional selections, use the Quick mask method.

The Selection Brush works fine for the simple tasks. (To be honest, I don’t see myself using the Selection Brush all that often, but we will see.)

I hope you found this tutorial useful!

Check out the New Photoshop features (July 2024)

Colin

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