This image is a little over-the-top, but I wanted to see what I could get for fun. To see the original image, click this link. My final example is of my crazy dancing diva Snowy Egret that I painted a while back. Below is the image as it looked coming from Lightroom with just basic slider adjustments. The original color from the Cluster Brush strokes layer gave the other filters more colors to work with to get the overall final image. To finish up the image, Topaz (for website link, see sidebar at my Tidbits Blog) Texture Effects 2’s 90s Cloud preset was applied, and next Topaz Impression 2. In Photoshop, this layer was set to Overlay blend mode at 80% layer opacity. It can be seen how much more color is in the image by just adding a few colorful strokes onto the stalks. Here is another image that used the ParticleShop filter brushes – this time just the Cluster brush was used on the individual stalks using purple and darker brown colors. I have been having trouble figuring out which extra packs are the best for doing the enhancements I like without getting them all. As far as I am concerned, the only problem with these filters is the cost – by the time you buy most of the packs, it gets very expensive. Adding them in at the end of the workflow seems to work best for me. I really liked the effect in the image above. Therefore, why would I want to use them in PS? After experimenting with them, I found these brushes can be useful for getting a special effect to finish off an image. I was very skeptical when Corel came out with these brushes since I use Painter and the Particle Brushes are not ones I use much. What I really like about this program is that you have the option to save just the brush strokes made on the image to its own layer in PS where you can further manipulate the results. Several people recommended using the Eraser at a very low opacity to smooth as opposed to using the Mixer which tends to smear a little. There is also an Eraser brush to remove unwanted strokes and soften areas and Mixer brush to blend the effects. In this case, the tree leaves were brightened using the Cluster Brush to give that special effect to the little tree and the red tree branches. Set Glow to a darker color to get a full range from dark to light on your stroke. The Color Picker can be pinned to the interface and there is a Glow checkbox that can be added to your strokes. Somewhat like PS Brush Panel’s Color Dynamics Brightness Jitter slider. When set to the max 50%, 50% of the Color Picker Triangle values are added into the stroke. The Fur Brush also offers a Value Variability – set to 0 and the brush paints with 100% selected color. All the brushes offer Size and Opacity and the option to turn on pressure sensitivity for both. The brushes do have a bit of a Painter brush feel to them, as there are several extra variations for the some of the brushes that PS does not offer. This image used three brushes – the Cluster Brush, the Fur Brush and the Flame Brush. It consists of 10 different brushes that represent some of the various brush sets you can buy at Corel. The Exclusive Pack of brushes are loaded when the basic plug-in software is purchased. The plug-in is now accessed from the Filter menu in Photoshop so it is really easy to open up once the program has been loaded. Below is the original image after coming out of Lightroom where just the basic sliders were adjusted. The tree image above was taken in Florida and there was absolutely nothing that great about it. Thought I would show the before and after applying the filter to the images to give a feel for what these brushes can do. Lots of ParticleShop info is on YouTube about how to use this plug-in, so this blog is just a quick introduction. This week I am going to do a quick post on the Corel ParticleShop plug-in for Photoshop. INTRO TO COREL PARTICLESHOP BRUSHES FOR PHOTOSHOP
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