GIMP 2.10 Tutorial: Stunning Portrait Brush Effects

[Music] [Music] hello and welcome to yet another tutorial by Davies media design my name is Michael Davies and today I'm gonna be showing you how to create portrait brush effects or basically taking a photo and making it appear as if it's framed by a bunch of brush strokes here creates a really cool artistic effect as you can see here and I put this on a white background to help this stand out and I've added some colors in here that I took from the image itself and then I added some text here and this is a really cool effect that creatively frames your images and really brings them to light but before we get into that of course I want to direct you guys over to my website at Davies media design.com we've got tons of video and text tutorials on here as well as project translate so definitely check that out you can also enroll in our photo editing course from beginner to pro photo retoucher and thank you to the over 300 students that have enrolled in this course thus far I'll include a link to this as well as all of the relevant links from this tutorial in the description so here is the photo I use this is of a Cambodian woman and it's a really cool photo this is from pixabay this is a free download just click free download here and I downloaded the 1920 by 12 81 version and then I'm also using this paint brush set which you can download from brush easy for free so go ahead and click this free download button here I recommend scanning this with an anti-virus software before you unzip it but it's going to download to whatever destination file folder you select and it's going to download as a zip right here and you can right-click and right here you'll see extract all if you're on Windows and that will extract it into another folder such as this one and if you click on it you've got the Mac OSX option here and then you've got the dot ABR file which is the brush file and so if you're in Windows you can just basically copy this and then navigate over to your brushes folder in you'll see I went to my PC which you know that's clicking right here and then I went to my C Drive Program Files to share 2.0 brushes so I recommend pausing the video and just going through this flow of folders right here and then once you're in the brushes folder all you gotta do is paste that brush into this brushes folder and that's exactly what I've done already so here is that brush filed the ABR brush file then you can come over to and I'm in two point ten point two so this is the latest version of but this all applies to the older versions as well for the most part and if I click on my paintbrush tool here I've got my brushes in here and you can pull up this dialogue here by clicking on the little paintbrush icon it looks the same as the icon up here and that'll open that up over here in one of your dockable dialogue areas so you can see all your brushes here go ahead and hit this green refresh arrow and that will refresh all your brushes in here and you should see these are the paint brushes that we just downloaded from brush easy what I want to do is create a new composition so go to file new and this was the original width and height of this composition here so I'll just go ahead and click OK and right now this has the background color of the background color I have selected here which is this blue color but I can go ahead and change that using the bucket fill tool I'll just fill that in with white and now what I need to do is import my photo so I'll go to file and in my case I'll go to open recent and go ahead and open up that photo from my computer you could just go to file open and so here is our original image and I can edit copy this and then come over here and edit paste and that'll paste this as a floating selection layer and I'll go ahead and click this create a new layer icon to put this on its own layer and you can just name this woman and grab your move tool here and go ahead and move this position it to where you want I've got mine in the center of the image here and I brought it up a little bit more towards the top and you can move this later if you need to so now we've got this positioned here so the main technique is applying a layer mask to this and then brushing on that layer mask to reveal what's underneath it so to do that I'll click on this woman layer or the photo layer and right click and go to add layer mask and under initialize layer mask - I'm gonna choose black full transparency so click add and what that will do is hide my entire image so now we can't really see anything and so we're gonna come over here and grab our brush and if you guys will remember from previous lectures if you on my channel black on a layer mask is going to hide everything on the layer and when you paint white on a layer mask it's going to reveal everything where that white is painted so we're gonna go ahead and paint some white here so I've got my brush set to this white color here and now we can come over here to our brushes and I'll go ahead and click on one of these brushes we downloaded and I'm gonna start by turning the opacity way up to 100 and then you can increase the size of your brush either using the size slider or you can use the left and right brackets on your keyboard and so I'll start by just kind of trying to guess where our model is underneath this layer mask and so here you can see our model is revealed and I also want to show her hat so I'll go ahead and paint some strokes here by your hat and so now we have like a general understanding of what our model is but we don't want to use the same paintbrush while we're doing this throughout this whole composition otherwise it'll look a little bit boring so I'll come over here and switch to another paintbrush and use the brackets on my keyboard or the size slider to increase the size of this and you'll see I'm just sort of adding random brushstrokes and if I don't like something I'll just take control Z and start over I don't want too much of the same brush strokes all together cuz it'll just look sort of artificial and redundant so I'll just go ahead and change my brush again and paint some strokes like this and again you can adjust the size of your brush here you can also adjust the angle so right now this brush is up and down or sort of more vertical but I can change the angle on this so that it rotates a little bit now it's a little bit more sideways you'll see and so that just adds a little bit more variety to our composition and then I'll grab another paint brush here and I'm just painting directly on this layer mask and now I'm starting to reveal some of the water here below which looks really cool and I've also got some textured paint brushes down here and I believe these come with by default so you can see you know they've got the names of the textures on here of what they are so you've got like a smoke brush sponge text and then you've got some other textures down here so you can also feel free to use some of these textures on here and you can always click on this icon here which will reset this to black and white and I've got black selected right now so anytime you paint black on something that's going to paint stuff back onto the layer mask so you'll see that now that white that's underneath is coming through again and that just helps us you know just sort of refine our layer mask and really start to make our brush effects look the way we want them to so grab another brush here and I'll just keep the angle as is I'll hit control Z I actually want to switch back to white which you can do by clicking here or hit X on your keyboard and that'll allow you to switch between black and white and so I'm just adding a variety of brush strokes on here and then you could start to mess with the opacity as well so you'll see that when I turn that opacity down it'll leave some of the white there so that it just kind of makes the stroke just stand out a little bit more against the other strokes or it sort of overlays that stroke on top of the other ones so just create some more layers there and again I can adjust my angle and switch my brush up again just the opacity again and grab another brush here maybe increase the size a bit also if you want to make sure that your brushstrokes don't get cut off by the layer you can click on your layer and go to layer layer to image size and that'll change the size of your layer to the size of the entire composition so you can see I'm just sort of testing out strokes here and I'll hit ctrl Z if I don't like the way it looks and I'll switch to again and actually I do want to make sure that I'm on the layer mask here so just now I painted some stuff that was not on the layer mask and that's not what we want so I'll just undo that switch back over here and make sure I'm on the layer mask and then go back to painting on the layer mask I want to get rid of this a little bit here so I'll just paint some black right here and then I can change the angle all right so once you're done with the general framing of your subject here what I did on my original composition here is I grabbed a color from the composition itself so I've got this sort of blue color here and I painted around the outside of that frame we made so I'll come back over here to our composition and I'll click on our main layer I'll grab the color picker tool here and I'll grab the eyedropper tool so I use the blue from inside her shirt so actually let me grab a zoom tool here and zoom in a little bit and I'll go back to our foreground color grab the color picker tool so you'll see that there is some blue here in her dress so I just grabbed that blue and clicked okay and then I'll hold the ctrl key and click to zoom out and now I'll go ahead and create a new layer and you can name this blue brushstrokes make sure the fill width is set to transparency and click OK and then go ahead and grab your paintbrush tool again and now you'll see that our color is set to this blue color go ahead and test it out and see how it looks here I'll hit control Z make sure this layer is below your photo layer and I'm actually going to turn down the opacity a little bit on this brush and just apply some strokes here and the thing I like about this color is that it works really well with the green right here these colors just mesh well together for whatever reason and so I switch between different brushes here and just kind of stroked underneath just pretty much randomly while switching between my brushes randomly to give this a more dynamic look and you'll see that this really complements that green so it really helps us frame our composition even more and just add a little a bit more color to this and as always you can just adjust the opacity periodically while you work and that will help make this look a little bit more dynamic all right now that we're done with that I'm going to add some text in here and I'm using our next bold font which I downloaded for free and I use this in several other tutorials so all including link to that font in the description but go ahead and click on your composition and type out whatever you want I just typed Beauty and then two forward slashes and then tradition that's what I think of when I see this photo and I'll go ahead and double click on our text area to select all the text and then I want to increase the spacing between the text so I'll just increase what's called the kerning here and I'll do that to about 15 then come over here and make sure your text layer is above this picture layer and that's going to make it easier for the next step which is to align this text so go ahead and grab your alignment tool and click on the text and you'll see these little squares in the corner of the layer when you're trying to align it and go ahead and choose a line relative to and select image and then click the center line option here and that will centre align your text on the image here so I think this blue text actually looks good with this but you can also go with the green text which is what I did on the original so just double click on this text again you'll see a little color box here you'll also see it over here you can change either one but I'll click on here grab the color picker tool and you can go ahead and grab a green from inside the composition and click OK once you've done that go ahead and click off of the layer and you can reposition this with the move tool so what I like to do I'll click on that layer again click on it once and then I can just use the arrows on my keyboard to move this down that way I don't have to worry about this not being Center aligned after I move it and now the last thing I'm gonna do is just add a gradient behind here so I'll create a new layer and name this gradient and make sure the fill width is set to transparency again and click OK make sure the gradient layer is below the photo layer here and the blue brushstrokes layer so just click and drag that in your layers panel until it goes below those layers you do want to make sure it's above that background layer though then come over here to your gradient tool and I'll change my foreground color back to black here click OK I've got the color of my gradient set to foreground a transparency and then my shape here is set to radial and then just click in the middle here and drag and that will create you'll see a radial gradient behind here so it just adds a little bit of depth to this and go ahead and hit enter and that will apply that gradient and there you go so if I hide my background layer you can see this is what this looks like without a background so you can add really any color background that you want I just think white helps us stand out a little bit better so that's it for this tutorial as you could see it created a really cool effect and it was pretty simple to do so thanks for watching if you liked it please check out our YouTube channel for more tutorials at youtube.com slash Davies media design you can also visit our web site at Davies media design.com and you can join over 300 students and enroll in our photo editing course from beginner to pro photo retoucher and i'll include a link to that as well as all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description so thanks for watching and we'll see you next time you

Channel: Davies Media Design

Views: 39,748

Keywords: gimp, gimp tutorial, gimp for beginners, how to gimp, gimp graphic design, gimp photo editing, gimp 2018, GIMP 2.10, GIMP, basics, photo manipulation, photo editing, portrait brush effects, brush effects, download brushes, asian, cambodian, cambodia, portrait, portrait photos, photography, paintbrush

Id: 3ZymFyAdn0I

Length: 14min 49sec (889 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 19 2018