hi again folks, i was today in a photographic print store where i saw images where someone had taken a normal photograph and had digitally painted it so that it looked as if it had been painted by hand. Can anyone please let me know what program this is best done in or how it is achieved?

ta jeff

I think corel painter is the most popular for that.......with a tablet.

Check out Helen Yancy....i saw her a few years ago and she was breaking new ground with that stuff

Corel pianter is terrific. It replicates oils, watercolor,pastels, you name it , it does it. It even has a tool
Where you can clone an image and set the color picker to clone. It samples colors from the original image
as you piant the cloned. All you need to do is pick a style and brush over the image. Even as cool as this
program is. I still choose to do things in Photoshop. You can get some pretty pinterly effects by playing
with the brushes. Also using the smudge tool and the blur tool. I did this image all with photoshop.
http://photoshopcontest.com/view-entry/83263/display.html
I find it looks better if you actually draw the image first. I'm not saying to render the hole thing like a
pencil drawing. I am saying to, on a seperate layer, make an outline of the original image. Out line all
the color changes and edges until it looks like a piant by numbers. Then simply sample the colors underneath as
you paint with the air brush set to soft @ 30% opacity. Sample colors often and use the smudge and
blur tools to soften edges and move around paint. That is how I did this image.
Good Luck

Reyrey,I wish I had read your author' notes a little more carefully. Now I understand what you did. That easily deserved more than the one vote I could give, but didn't. And thanks for the painting tutorial and information here.

There are some nice tuts on Painter here http://www.designertoday.com/tabindex-13/tabid-27/DesktopDefault.aspx

What Rey said about Painter is right on and his way of doing this with Photoshop made me wonder could you use Find edges and get the same effect as tracing the outline?

you can download a free trial version of painter here
http://www.corel.com/painterix/home/index.html
Try it out first.