Photoshop: Pixel Bender Plug-in

[Barathor]

Hey, guys.

I just wanted to throw this out here in case the community finds this useful (I sure did). Plus, I want to see the cool things you guys might come up with if you do use it.

As some may already know, Photoshop CS6 has a cool new Oil Painting filter built into it. When I saw this as one of the new features I was both excited and bummed (because my CS5 doesn't have it! And I usually don't upgrade an application unless I'm jumping up a couple versions.). I figured it would be a great additional tool for creating Civ graphics -- especially those wonder scenes and such.

While searching around for tutorials on how to achieve the same effect manually, I came across this cool plug-in by Adobe Labs: Pixel Bender!

This is what the new CS6 Oil Painting filter is based off of (I guess it was popular plug-in effect).

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For CS5:
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/pixelbenderplugin/

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For CS4:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/pixelbender.html
(scroll towards bottom of page, under "Archived downloads")

Direct Links for the CS4 version if you're having trouble finding them:
Win32/Mac: http://download.macromedia.com/pub/developer/pixelbender/pbplugin_ps32b_111708.mxp
Win64: http://download.macromedia.com/pub/developer/pixelbender/pbplugin_ps64b_111708.mxp

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There are five sliders within the Oil Paint filter:

Stylization (0.1 - 10.0):

This seems to control how wavy and swirly the brush strokes are. If you go too high, the image distorts much more. This is one of the two main sliders you'll be tinkering with to get the desired effect.

Cleanliness (2 - 15):

This seems to control how thick the brush strokes are. This is the second slider you'll mostly be tinkering with alongside Stylization to get the look you want. If one of the sliders is to be higher than the other one, I usually go with this one and use less Stylization.

Colorization (0 - 2):

When not utilizing BrushScale and BrushContrast below, this seems to just raise the contrast of the image. BUT, if you utilizing textures in your image, then it does much nicer effects. Basically, under 1 lowers the contrast and makes the ridges of textures whiter. Over 1, raises the contrast and makes the ridges of textures blacker.

BrushScale (0.1 - 10):

Controls the scale of brush textures. If BrushContrast is set to 0, you won't see any effect.

BrushContrast (0 - 1):

Controls the contrast of brush textures (if it wasn't obvious). You can make them barely visible and light to very distinct and dark. It's almost like an opacity slider.

I generally like this at 0 because I love the creamy, smooth look of the oil paint for most things. (Plus, if you go and sharpen the results of this effect with another filter, you won't get excessive white lines and pixels everywhere due to the texture.)

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Here are some examples as I was playing around with some of the effects on Eddard :

Original:

Pixel Bender Oil Paint Effect + a bit of the Sharpen Filter:
(Oh, as you can see, I also masked the background, applied an outer glow, and a gradient overlay over the image. I also desaturated the colors a little bit for a gloomier look to go along with the background and fading/ghostly effect I had going on.)

Reapplying the Oil Paint Effect + the Sharpen Filter again:

Another example applying a Paint Daub Filter effect to the 3rd image:

Another example applying a Dry Brush Filter effect to the 3rd image:

Another example applying an Angled Strokes Filter effect to the 3rd image: