The world of digital imaging is an amazing place! Retouching an image can be as simple as removing the signs of age, such as wrinkles or skin blemishes, or it can be exquisitely complex as with building advanced composites comprising of many layers and images. I’ve written about composites in another post, but today I want to talk about another digital possibility. Digital Painting. This ‘artform’ is coming into it’s own and some photographers devote all their time and energy to creating paintings from their images. It is a whole new sub-culture of digital artistry, with it’s own forums, techniques, software and masters. I recently started working with a program called Corel Painter Essentials 3, a ‘step’ program, which has a learning curve much easier than their full-blown paint program called Corel Painter X. Having a program such as Essentials will eventually lead to (the company hopes!) purchase of the high-end program. It came with my Wacom tablet as a part of the software bundle. Even though it is easier than the full program it’s still a learning process and fortunately they have decent tutorials that come with the program. Here are a couple examples I created from pictures taken last month at a KM shoot. First the original and two versions of painting.
