A Dog's Portrait - myJanee.com Graphic Creations

Graycie before we made her into a portrait

Of course there are many ways to wow up a snapshot to make it into a portrait worthy of a frame. And I’m going to show you one! For this tutorial, I got help from some amazing poodle parents in my Facebook poodle groups. Graycie here was photographed in stunning action by Eva Holguin.

Skills you’ll use in this process include these:

Masking to remove a background
Making a Merged Visibles Layer
Making your snapshot look like a watercolor painting
Making a Swatch collection
Making an interesting background
Saving your image in a format to print

A. Remove the background

File > New. Make your proportions and measurements what you think you may someday want for your output. 3300 x 4200 (pixels) will make an 11 x 14″ print at 300 ppi. For an 8 x 10, use 2400 x 3000. If you don’t want to do math or remember these, just make it a practice to make your canvas 3000 x 4000.

Drag your picture onto this canvas.

If your photo is the background layer in your Layers palette, do these:

Double-click its thumbnail to make it into a regular layer.

Then Ctrl-click the Create New Layer icon at the bottom of that palette to make a new layer beneath the photo.

Fill this layer with a solid color that contrasts with your photo.

I’m removing the background using a couple of tools. First, use the Object Selection tool to make a rectangle around your dog. In this case, I want the ball, too. Hold the Shift key and use the tool again to add to your selection, if it doesn’t get your whole dog at the first try.

As you see, this tool does a pretty credible job of selecting just the object I want, even with this pretty distracting background.

Now let’s lose the background. With this selection active, press the Add Layer Mask button:

But we still have some touchups to do.

What you’re going to do is, using your Brush tool paint black onto the mask where you want the image to be gone — any leftover background material, like the tan area between Graycie’s tail and her back.

You’re going to paint the mask white, where you want your image to show, where it’s now hidden, like some of the fuzz around her edges.

Masking of hair has been a problem that’s vexed many a Photoshop artist since time began, back in the ’90’s. There are lots of secrets out there, some of which I came up with on my own! I don’t know if anyone does this to “fluff up” the hair of a poodle, but this works well:

After you’ve done most of the painting in of the dog and painting out of the old background, reduce your brush size to a pixel or two. Zoom in so you can really see what you’re doing. Use short brush strokes on the mask to make the outer hairs reappear.

Here’s another tip: Choose your Smudge Tool and use little back and forth motions along the border of the dog. Go in the direction that the hair is going, and you will have better results. Keep at this till you’re happy!

B. Adjust Color and Tonality

I may be going backwards here, but it’s my tutorial, so I can go backwards if I so choose. The poodle looks too dark to me. So, at this point, I can go on and do any adjustments I need to do to bring out the dog. Graycie needed a Curves Adjustment Layer.

Alt-click between the Adjustment Layer and the layer in the Layers palette to group the two. That will keep the adjustment from affecting the layers below.

C. Paint your dog

For this process, you can get creative, leaving more or less detail, depending upon your goals. I want to make Graycie into something of a watercolor effect. T

I wrote up this particular formulation for Katrin Eismann’s Photoshop Restoration and Retouching in 2006.

1. Set it up:

Turn off visibility for your Background layer, so that all you see is your cut-out dog.
Hold Ctrl-Alt-Shift as you type N and then E. This little technique makes a new layer which is a merge of all the visible layers. Very cool technique to know. I call it CAS-NE.
Duplicate this layer three times, by repeating the CAS-NE process. Turn off the Visibility Eyes for all but the bottom of your CAS-NE layers. Your Layers palette should look like this one.

After the first use of Filter Gallery, it will show up at the TOP after you click Filter. That will just redo the last settings you used. Be careful to click the “Filter Gallery” that is NOT at the top.

2. On this bottom CAS-NE layer, use Filter > Artistic > Cutout. For your settings, choose 4, 4, and 2. Click OK.

At the top of the Layers palette, see where it says “Normal”? That’s Blending Mode. Set this to Luminosity.

TIP: After you do an effect on a layer, label your layer with what you did.

3. Move to the next layer up and turn on its visibility eye.

Filter > Filter Gallery > Artistic > Dry Brush. Choose 10, 10, and 3 for your settings. Click OK. Change its Blending Mode to Screen.

4. Move up one more layer and turn on its visibility eye. Filter > Noise > Median. Set it to 12. Now put this into Soft Light Blending Mode. And here’s what Graycie’s face looks like now.

D. Optional: Make your own custom Swatch collection

If you’re working with a client on this, your creative process should begin by asking the client what colors s/he loves, the colors of the room where it will hang, etc.. For this part, you can do just about anything.

I’m going to begin by collecting some colors to use. I’ll put these into a custom swatch collection. Begin this by finding your Swatches. Either click the little icon to the upper right in my image, or go to Window > Swatches. You can make your own grouping and add swatches to it.

Click that folder icon and name your collection.
Click the folder in the list.
Go to your Color Picker and choose a color.
Now click Add to Swatches on the Color Picker. You can even name these colors.

E. Make a basic background

I like to start somewhere simple. Click your background layer and then the New Layer icon. Now choose one of your colors and fill the new layer with it.
Filter > Noise > Add Noise.
Filter > Pixelate > Crystallize. Can you do something different? Why, yes you can, and I hope you will!

F. Jazz up the background

Make a new layer. Choose a brush and some crazy options and get creative. Try to keep your color families related. For Graycie, I’m probably going to want to keep my colors pretty desaturated for this background to work, but the point is to let your own creativity shine.
Do glows and shading as you wish to make your image “pop.”
Sign your dog’s name.

G. I promised you I’d show you how to save this in a format you could print. PSD, Photoshop’s native format, does not work well with the print services. So you want to save your format in a different file type.

I like saving into JPG for sending images off to Costco or Walmart for printing. This format compresses the file, but not enough that you’re going to notice it in the end. The benefit is that your file is not huge, so it will transmit quickly.

Check your image size, just to be sure. Image > Image Size. Have a look. Your ppi should be at 300 and the image size should be what you created in the beginning.

Now to save. Ctrl-S to save your PSD first. Now File > Save as.. and change your file type to JPG. Use the sliders to establish the file size and amount of compression. OK. Name your file and you’re ready to send it off to the printer!

And go wild! Here are some more dogs I’ve done. Please click to enlarge. Do yours and send it to me!