Need help making photo look like painting! I'm a newbie!

[the_naj]

Hi everyone. I hope someone can help me. I recently got Xara Photo and Graphics Designer 2013 and my main thing at the moment is to make photos look like paintings or pastels etc. I cannot find where to do this. I have left and right clicked on almost everything and cannot locate the drop down menu or whatever there is to do this. I hope someone can help me. I cannot locate any info in the "help" section either. Thanks in advance for any, any help given to me.

[Acorn]

Select the image.
Then the Photo tool and pick the Live Effects tools (FX) icon.
Click New > Art filter > Painting.

Acorn

[the_naj]

Select the image.
Then the Photo tool and pick the Live Effects tools (FX) icon.
Click New > Art filter > Painting.

Acorn

Thank you so much. I was going crazy trying to find it! You're a lifesaver!

[gwpriester]

Welcome to TalkGraphics the_naj

There are lots of other cool filters in the FX menu. Experiment with all of them and see what they do.

[Gamerprinter]

You could call me insane, but I've used xara to "hand paint" converting a photograph into a "painted illustration" without using an FX tools. I've done this a half dozen times, sometimes with remarkable results. The first file below is the Xara file I created, with the second as a thumbnail of the original. As you can see the horses legs weren't in the original, I had to add those.

The process involves zooming in and creating vector shapes with every color in the texture of the photo, apply heavy edge feathering and transparency layers stacked on top of other created shapes, in a process that took me probably five hours to create the final work.

samurai-illustration.xar

[handrawn]

that's an impressive piece of work