I wanted to use some of my favorite images I’ve shot of flowers and the outdoors to decorate the house. Since I prefer the aesthetic of painterly prints, I experimented in Photoshop Elements by using one of the tools—wait for it—the Watercolor Filter—to create watercolor art instead of merely framing an enlarged version of the photograph.

On a favorite outing a few years ago, I snapped this picture of the beach in Bodega, close to our house, and I’ve always loved the light, the detail, the color, and the memories! But before framing it, I wanted to give it a more artistic appearance.

I initially tried the Waterlogue software; while it produced a respectable image, I wished I had more control over the detail.

So I gave Photoshop Elements’ Watercolor Filter a go, and I found that I slightly preferred the effect. It delivered the deeper color and greater level of detail I was searching for. If you’re an expert with Photoshop, you already know this is a wonderful tool, but even if you’ve never played around with it, it’s a simple method to add watercolor effects to your photos. Just use the drop-down filter menu to select Artistic -> Watercolor.

You’ll receive a pop-up window, and it gave me this, where I could change the texture, shadow intensity, and brush detail. I adore it.
“The remedy for anything is saltwater: sweat, tears, or the sea,” is a favorite Isak Dinesen quotation that I included.
With another beloved image of tulips in vases on my mantel from a few years ago, I used the same watercolor filter.

This one turned out a little bit too muddy around the margins of the flowers and leaves, so I used the Color Picker Tool to sample colors and the Oil Small Tip brush from the Brushes collection to blur some of the details between the petals, stems, and other parts of the flower with brushstrokes. It’s convenient that you can zoom in and edit photos in this way.

In order to enhance the purple tones and make them stand out more, I played with the Brightness/Contrast and Hue Tools as well as the Watercolor Filter once more with this image of a bunch of lavender I picked from my garden.

The outcome:

I appreciate how the prints now resemble a hybrid of a watercolor painting and a photograph. These prints, along with three others, can be purchased in my Society6 shop .

You may get PE 13 and test it out for 30 days without charge thanks to Adobe. Try the watercolor filter and brush tools, if you haven’t already, to give your favorite pictures a creative touch.:)

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