Insight Adding Realistic Relief to Images with Corel Painter By Cher Threinen-Pendarvis Dateline: December 16, 2005 Version: Corel Painter IX
You can add a realistic bas relief look to your photos and paintings with textured highlights and shadows using Corel Painter. These effects can be applied to an entire image, selection, or layer. Using a photograph I shot while visiting a castle in Germany, I’ll show you how to alter an image using Glass Distortion, apply realistic highlights and shadows using Apply Surface Texture, and retouch areas for subtlety with a Cloners brush.
	Choose an image with a strong focal point and good highlights and shadows. You can achieve good results with either crisp or soft-focus images. Save a copy of your image so that you do not replace your original. I saved my copy in RIFF format to preserve Painter’s native effects. I wanted to apply the effects to just the castle, so I selected the sky areas using the Magic Wand tool and inverted the selection so the castle was selected (Select > Invert). I then floated a copy of the castle to a layer by pressing Option/Alt and choosing Select > Float.
	To distort the image using its luminosity information, create a Glass Distortion dynamic layer by clicking on the Dynamic Layers plug icon at the bottom of the Layers palette and choosing Glass Distortion from the resulting menu. Choose Using > Image Luminance, and adjust the settings for a subtle effect. Click OK.
	To add realistic relief, choose Effects > Surface Control > Apply Surface Texture. (If the Commit dialog box appears asking to convert the Dynamic Layer to an Image Layer, choose Commit.) To apply highlights and shadows that match the distortion applied to the image, choose Image Luminance from the Using menu. Use subtle-to-moderate Surface Texture settings to avoid a harsh look and to preserve the original image. Choose a light direction that complements the light in the image, and click OK. Save the image.
	If you want to make the effects more subtle in a few areas, retouch them using Cloning brushes and imagery from your original photo. In my image, I wanted to make the highlight on the left side of the outer wall more refined. Open the original image, choose File > Clone Source, then choose the name of the original image from the list. Now choose the Cloners brush category from the Brush Selector and choose the Soft Cloner variant. Zoom into the image, and use the stylus to touch up any areas to subtly paint some of the original photo back into the image. When you’re finished, save this final version of your image. After completing my image, I dropped all of the layers (Layers > Drop All). Using the Crop tool, I cropped a portion of the sky to create a more interesting negative space along the top of the building.

Don't miss the next tip on Graphics.com. Get the free Graphics.com newsletter in your mailbox each week. Click here to subscribe.

Cher Threinen-Pendarvis is an award-winning artist, author, and educator based in San Diego and author of “Photoshop and Painter Artist Tablet Book, Creative Techniques in Digital Painting,” and “The Painter IX Wow! Book.”