I had posted a few images from this shoot. The client placed a very large order of several of the shots. This one she decided to do a 30x24 watercolor after painting with corel painter. I thought I would share it here.

Very nice!

Bob,
lovely effect. Very well done.

Jim

Lovely image.

Thanks folks! Appreciate the kind words. This one was fun. I would shoot the 2 of them again in about a nanosecond! By the way, this was with my 40d prior to getting my 5d. I want to go back with my 5d!

Hey Bob,

Can you talk about how you created the affect a bit? Would you tell me a bit about Corel Painter?

Cheers
James

sure. Although I have corel painter I actually hired someone to paint this. Basically what you do is you take the image and "paint the pixels". Simple renditions you can do fairly automated but still pretty time consuming but like this image I wanted it to look very much like a painting, wanted to retain all the detail in the girl and the dog, while exaggerating the grass / fence and so forth. This is beyond my skills and quite frankly I don't have the time so I hired an artist. You can see a demo here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoBhCkeYJTI&feature=related .
You really have flexibility in just how far you want to go but I can tell you the markup / profit can be substantial. I did not mark this one up as much but most do a markup as much as 5X just on the painting. The girl that did this for me took about 2 weeks. What I also did was made studio samples of the original image and then a large studio sample of the finished painting printed on watercolor paper and mounted. This girl is very very talented.
By the way, here is the original image prior to a little more PP and painting:

James, I also suggest you stay very linked to the artist if you hire someone. They can get carried away and your image will not look at all like your original image. As you can see if you compare the original to the painted the image really did not change itself. Also as a side note, the first time I saw this done was with bride formals and they were smoking! Brides go nuts over this....... Very elegant! I suggest if interested find a local artist that does the work. You can have say Millers or others do it but again, you don't have the relationship to stay involved in the process.

Hey Bob,

Thanks for sharing. I take it that there is enough of a profit margin than to hire someone else to fix up the photograph? Do you use the photographs for secondary purposes (much like the artist who is working from your photo might?)?

Cheers
James

James, email me and I'll cover the profit question. I want to be clear about how this is done. You actually use the digital image and go in with Corel Painter and do some painting of the pixels so that some are brush strokes vs round pixels. As you can see the real core of the image isn't changes, just enhanced, much like any other PP just more dramatic. My main business I do is Photo's but I really focus on larger portraits. I try to stay away from the 2 8x10's and 17 5x7 business. And yes, there is plenty of profit even though my prices are well below the competition. On this piece my price to the client is at least 1/2 the competition and I make a nice profit. This work is also not the work that pays the grocery bills. A large computer company that goes by a 3 letter acronym takes care of that and 90% of my time. I am actually a Marketing Exec full time there so photography is mainly filler and something I love to do.