How to make a photo look like an oil painting in photoshop

My oil painting effect

First off you need a good photograph, the higher the resolution the better. This won’t work so well with a small 72dpi image, so get a good hires photograph to start with. It’s also best, if you have your subject in the center of the composition, looking at the camera. You could do this oil painting with any subject matter, but for this tutorial we’ll keep it simple.
Look at the time lapse video of me in action, the oil painting technique is very simple. The basic premise is that we are brushing over the top of the original image with the smudge tool. Its all in the brush work or in this case the mouse work – and goes something like this.

The steps I did

1. Pick a big art brush (fan brush is good)
2. Select the smudge tool
3. Duplicate your photo layer
4. Follow the contour of the face and smudge very roughly at first
5. Use long flowing brush marks (the aim is to smudge everything, eventually)
6. After you have smudged each area, like the ear, flatten with the layer below
7. Adjust the Strength of the smudge tool to get different effects.
8. Duplicate the layer and smudge again

Oil painting in Photoshop tips

Change your paint brush, and brush size often, so the brush marks are not all the same. The eye for instance will need a smaller brush, the forehead a bigger brush.
The fan brush is good for blending. I’ve used it to blend the edge of the person to the background, to give that blurry, misty painting technique.
Push the paint around from dark areas to lighter areas and vice versa. Use long and short brush strokes. Don’t worry if you make a mistake, just undo or smudge the paint over the mistake.
Change the strength of the smudge tool, 80% is good for strong bold brush marks, 40% is good to blend the paint rather than smudge it. Less than 40% produces very delicate results a bit like the blur tool.
You could use blur filter to blur the edge of the figure, so it looks a bit more dreamlike. Be carefull not to over do it.

Sharpen the image to get realistic brush strokes

Once you have finished your smudge painting, you need to sharpen your image to reveal the brush marks. This really brings the painting to life, it makes it pop, and looks like real brush strokes – it goes something like this.

1. Duplicate your paint layer
2. Use filter/smart sharpen
3. Set Amount to 500% and radius of 1.8 (depending on your photo resolution, adjust)
4. Look good? now knock back the opacity a bit.

Optionally add a texture layer

Finally I’ve added a kind of paint overlay to my whole image and knocked it back. I just wanted some extra texture in the background to give it a kind of aged look. You don’t need this, but I liked it.
This oil painting technique might sound complicated but trust me its really, really easy to do.
Thanks for popping by.

Before Photoshop

After the oil painting effect