Turn Your Fall Landscape Photographs into Works of Art

Fall is one of my favorite seasons for landscape photography.  If you can time the changing colors right in your area, you can create some beautiful landscape photographs.

Original Photograph

There are several photo processing plugins for Photoshop and Lightroom that will give your fall photographs an artistic look.  These plugins can imitate techniques like Oil painting, Watercolor, Gouache, and more.

Fall landscape photographs are perfect for this artistic technique.  In this blog, I’ll show you several versions of the same photograph using different plugins and also the Gaussian Blur filter in Photoshop.

The plugins used for this blog are Akvis OilPaint, Topaz Impression, Topaz  Simplify, and the Gaussian Blur filter in Photoshop.  I’ll talk briefly about each tool after the photo it created.  The photo at the top of the blog is the original edited photo without using any of the art plugins.

Topaz Impression

Topaz Impression – Watercolor VI

For this photo, I used the Watercolor VI preset in Topaz Impression.  Topaz Impression comes with over 100 presets.  You can also modify the brush characteristics, color attributes, and lighting effects for the preset.  Textures and vignettes can also be added to the images.

AKVIS OilPaint

AKVIS Oilpaint – Rich Colors

AKVIS OilPaint is a plugin dedicated to Oil Painting.  They also have another Plugin call ArtWork that has other styles of painting.  I find that the processing and rendering in OilPaint is much faster than in ArtWork.

Like Topaz Impression, OilPaint comes with presets. OilPaint has 20 presets and also allows you to change brush characteristics, add text and textures.  I used the Rich Colors preset for this photo.

Topaz Simplify

Topaz Simplify – Watercolor 

Topaz Simplify doesn’t have as many presets or allow the amount of customization as Topaz Impression.  If you are shopping for a painting plugin, I’d choose Topaz Impression over Simplify.  However if you got Simplify as part of a bundle, it can still be used to add painted effects to your photos.

Simplify comes with 30 presets and does allow you to make global and local adjustments to the photo.  I find many of the presets are quite bold.  I prefer the Underpainting and Watercolor presets.

Gaussian Blur Filter

If you don’t have one of these plugins, you can still add painting effects to your photos with Photoshop.  In Photoshop, use the Gaussian Blur filter to soften the image.  You can then use adjustment filters like Hue/Saturation, Brightness/Contrast, and Vibrance to add additional effects to your photographs.

Photoshop Gaussian Blur Filter

Written by Martin Belan

Related Posts
Topaz Impression – Turn Your Photos into Works of Art
Photo Story: White Plumeria – Painted Look
AKVIS OilPaint Photo Processing Software Review