Step by Step: Impressionist images

Turn your photos into paintings, and add a brushed border from our gift set

There are several ways to turn a photo into an image that looks like an Impressionist painting. These extend from creative shooting techniques with intentional camera movement during the exposure to more obvious digital manipulation when you process the picture. We’ll focus on the latter here, with a technique that’s not only quick and easy to apply, but also one that doesn’t use any stock paint effects from Photoshop’s Filter Gallery; it can also be varied in all kinds of subtle ways to get a huge variety of different looks.

This project involves starting with a single base image, but you’ll then blend that image with multiple copies of itself, each of which is shifted and blurred to break up the continuity of the edges, until you achieve the painterly effect we’re after.

To round off the image, we’ll add a hand-painted border, and we have 20 of these for you to choose from on this issue’s download. Just look in the Gifts folder.