Cloning a landscape photo using other paint brushes

In this section, we are going to take on a trickier subject. Before you start making the clone, it's important to consider what medium will work best ith the scene. The challenges with this 'boat and houses' photo are the dark shadows and all the intersecting horizontal, vertical and angled lines. We decided to go for a simulation of a pencil drawing that had watercolour pencils and some watercolour washes applied to it. Our aim was to give the final image a light transparent look. We'll use the prepared photo as the clone source, a lightly coloured ground (paper), Watercolor brushes (none of the purpose-built Cloners) and a line drawing derived from the Sketch function.

Here's How...

1. Bring it to life. Open the boat photo from Corel.s Painter X tutorial page. To give the photo more vivacity, go to Effects>Tonal Control and pick Adjust Color. Increase the Saturation by 34 per cent and select File>Clone, All from the Select drop-down menu and Clear from the Edit menu.

2. Get the cloning ready. A click on the Transparency icon shows that the photo is still there. Watercolour paper is often off-white so use the Fill tool to add a light yellow colour (H:47 per cent, S:100 per cent, V: 93 per cent) to the white. Check under File>Clone Source that the right source image is selected.

3. Select a paper. Choose a texture now. We chose Hot Press from the list, which is a fairly smooth watercolour paper surface. We went for this because a rough watercolour paper might interfere with the line drawing. We decided to pick a Grainy brush because it shows the paper texture well.

4. Start Painting. We used the Grainy Wash Bristle variant from the Watercolors category with an Opacity of 26 per cent. With a light touch, cover in most of the image. Avoid going up to the edges and make sure you leave some gaps where the yellow paper shows through. The composite method changes to Gel. This happens by default with new or duplicated watercolour layers.

5. Develop the brushed coverage . We used the Wash Bristle brush here to add some additional colour, with the Opacity set to 26 per cent. The main purpose of this brush is to suggest some of the parallel marks made by the watercolour pencils which, at this stage, have not yet fully dissolved.

6. Add more body to the image. Now duplicate the image to give the picture more body via Select>All, then choosing Edit>Copy>Paste in Place. Select this rather than Paste. An identical, though slightly darker, layer appears above the current layer. Reduce the Opacity of the new layer to 30 per cent to keep the fuller colours and values, but lower the darkening that the Gel composite method introduces.

7. Prepare to add a grey pencil outline. With the original photo (the adjusted one) active, again choose Select>All and Edit>Copy. Then, with the cloned version active, select Edit/Paste in Place (again, not Paste). The original photo appears at the top of the layer stack. You need to use the original photo so that the sketch from it will have crisp outlines.

8. Create the pencil sketch. Go to Effects>Surface Control>Sketch and the Sketch parameters box will appear. Type in the following settings: Sensitivity: 1.00, Smoothing 1.20, Grain: 0.00, Threshold High: 40 per cent, Threshold Low: ten per cent. This will produce a black-on-white outline drawing. Then change the Layer composite mode to Multiply so that you can see the coloured image below the line drawing.

9. Add a new layer and more colour. educe the Opacity of the sketch layer so that there’s a nice balance between the line drawing and watercolour layer. Then create a new watercolour layer by clicking on the blue droplet icon at the bottom of the Layers palette. Use the Diffuse Bristle brush at an Opacity of 45 per cent to add some more paint, again making sure not to cover the whole picture evenly.

10. Save as RIFF. This is worth a separate step. Get into the habit of saving layered images as RIFFs - Painter's native file format. This will preserve your stacked layers. You should do this after every level has been completed. You can always delete them later. It's better to have too many than risk losing the whole layer stack. You can use the Iterative Save function for this, too.

11. Add some clean yellow paper. The edges need a little more air so save the whole image as a TIF, close the saved RIFF image and open the TIF version. This is no longer a watercolour layer so you can make changes easily. Sample the background colour and use a Fine Feathering Oils 30 brush (from the Oils) to paint in a little more unused paper around the edges.

12. Apply Surface Texture and final sharpening. First, add a little more Saturation at about 14 per cent, and then some Surface Texture, using Hot Press paper all-over as before. The settings are shown above. Finally, add some sharpening via Effects>Focus>Sharpen. Use the Gaussian Opening settings with the Amount set to 1.77, and the Highlight and Shadow both at 100 per cent.