A Quick Painterly Effect With Photoshop CS5 and Pixel Bender Oil Paint Filter

There’s a free filter called Pixel Bender for Adobe Photoshop CS5. You can download Pixel Bender from the labs.adobe.com site. While this filter has several effects, the most compelling by far is the Oil Paint filter.

I’ve done some quick playing around with the Pixel Bender Oil Paint filter. (Remember these are just tests.) I’ve seen this filter used in an interesting way combined with other filters and refined with layer masks and further painting with the CS5 new Mixer Brush. (There’s a video course with Dave Cross on KelbyTraining.)

The Oil Paint Filter works well on animal fur.

Detail

I’ve found it can give some interesting effects on textured images. This is a photograph that I took and placed with my texture, Flower Garden.

Detail

Photograph of Wisteria against a Stone gate.

Detail

Tips

File Size: I’ve had problems using this filter with large files. I’ve read on the Pixel Bender forum that you may need to turn off “Process on GPU” in the Pixel Bender filter dialogue box. (see graphic below) This helps, but I still found I had to make my images smaller. My computer isn’t slow, but it’s not the fastest either, so perhaps a more powerful system would handle better. I’ll keep researching this issue. Share your own experience in the comments below.

Colors: Also, the preview for the colors is not very accurate in the pixel bender. Once I hit OK, the colors and contrast were much different. You may want to change your layer into a Smart Object so you can go back in and adjust the Pixel Bender settings. (Under the Filter menu, select “Convert for Smart Filters” as you can only use Smart Filters on Smart objects, you’ll be asked if you want to convert to a Smart Object. Hit OK.)

Clean Up: The swirly pattern can be too much in some areas, particularly eyes and pet noses. You can selectively reduce the effect in areas. If you converted to a Smart Object, you can paint in black on the layer mask to diminish the effect. Another approach in the beginning would be to duplicate your background layer and run the filter on the duplicate layer. Then place a layer mask in the Pixel Bender layer and paint back to the original below. You can also use the Photoshop CS5 new mixer brush to smooth out areas.

Sharpen: I found sharpening with either Photoshop or or the Topaz Labs Detail filter helped give detail to the Pixel Bender Oil Paint image.

Settings: To get a feel for what the Oil Paint settings do, try placing the sliders at extremes to really see what each slider does.

Resources

Pixel Bender Filter

Pixel Bender Forum

Topaz Labs Detail Filter

French Kiss Flower Garden Texture