Painterly Photo Improvisations With Photoshop

This video presents two demos showing how to work with Photoshop's Mixer Brush and Art History Brush tools to make your photographs look painterly (i.e., brush stroked) by digitally painting over them. You don't have to be a painter, illustrator or graphic designer to achieve painterly looks with them. The tools do the work for you, pulling content, colors and tones from your reference photograph.

The Mixer Brush tool is a digital painting tool that lets you blend colors and tones in images as if they're wet paint. The Art History Brush tool creates stylized strokes

These tools can be used to create art content to be added to composites or mixed-media art pieces, to create artworks for printing and framing and to create textural overlays and/or backgrounds. The Mixer Brush is frequently also used by portrait retouchers, along with frequency separation, for skin retouching.

Chapter Start Times:
00:00 Intro, Brush Tools Defined & Applications for the Tools
04:05 Demo 1 - Mixer Brush Tool
21:29 Demo 2 - Art History Brush Tool (& History Brush Tool)
36:58 Demo 3 - Creating a Textured Finish for Painted Photos

** Note: As I mentioned in the video, here's explanations of 4 Options settings for the Mixer Brush tool:
Wet = How much paint the Mixer Brush picks up from the image. The
higher the number the longer the paint streaks. The lower the number
the more opaque.
Load = A 'dry out' control. It represents the amount of paint added to
the paint reservoir. With a lower load, the paint strokes dry out faster &
produce shorter strokes.
Color Mix = The ratio of image paint to reservoir paint. 100% setting
picks up all paint from the image. 0% all paint comes from the
reservoir.
Flow Rate = How fast the paint flows as you paint. Higher flow means
more paint will be applied. Low flow produces longer, less opaque
strokes.

** Brushes Use Addendum: If you want to use one of your Ps Brushes with either of these tools and the brush preset you select won't work (or, keeps changing to the Brush Tool vs the Mixer Brush or Art History Brush), try the following: Press: Ctrl + Alt (or, Cmd + Opt) then click on the Ps brush you'd like to paint with. That should work!