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Tip #112
Daniel writes with a question about
Creating an impasto effect in Photoshop?

As you know "impasto" refers to the age-old painter effect of applying paints to the canvas with a heavy brush, or even a palette knife. The paints are applied in thick blobs, actually creating a 3D texture in the painting.
. . . Achieving this effect in Photoshop shouldn't be hard. Paint the image on different layers, then applying the lighting effect, add dimension to the strokes.

I turn to the wizard himself, Gary Bouton to help us with this inquiry. . .

Gary writes:

Hello Daniel-- I have two suggestions for creating embossed brush strokes:

Put the elements you want embossed in an alpha channel (you might want to create the text using one of the Assorted Brushes that you access from the Brushes palette's flyout menu.

Choose Assorted from the Brushes folder under Photoshop), blur it slightly to make the finished, embosed effect more pronounced, return your view to the RGB color composite channel (Ctrl [Macintosh:Cmd]+ ~ [tilde]), and then choose the LIghting Effects filter from the Filter menu.

. . . Choose directional as the Light type, and then yank on the direction source dot on the end of the handle in the proxy window to adjust the intensity of this filter. . . . Choose the alpha channel from the Texture Channel drop-down list, and then drag the Height slider so it reads areound 10 or so. . . . Drag the Gloss, Material, and Exposure sliders to zero, and then click on OK.

Or, go to MetaCreations

Download Painter Classic, the trial version. This will not let you save or export files, but would give you a better idea of what Painter 5 (or any version...I use versions 3 and 4) can do. You can always "cheap out" and take a screen capture of your work to save it, but it's unethical and the program is only $99.

First, create a document, then choose a brush type and paint away. Then from the File menu, choose Clone. . . . Fill the original with whatever color you like. Then, choose File>Clone Source, and pick the clone of Untitled-1 as the resource for your embossing. . . . With the original image in the foreground (the one you filled with color), choose Effects>Apply Surface Texture. . . . Choose Original Luminance from the Using: drop down box, play with the lighting and other controls in you like, and then click on OK to apply the effect.

Kindest Regards,
Gary David Bouton

Visit our *all new* Boutons' Web site for information on the computer graphics and multimedia books we've written, and other stuff.

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