Try a breath of ancient Chinese art and culture! With these simple intuitive steps of manipulations, you will learn how to create an original traditional style Chinese painting, which has an archaic charm just beyond your photo. Even with these basic Photoshop skills, you can quickly find a path to make a beautiful fairyland. So let’s hit it!

Final Image Preview

Take a look at the image we’ll be creating. Want access to the full PSD files and downloadable copies of every tutorial, including this one? Join Psd Plus for just $9/month. You can view the final image preview below.

Tutorial Details

• Program: Adobe Photoshop CS4
• Difficulty: Medium
• Estimated Completion Time: 1-2h

Step 1 – Preparing for the Paper

Open a picture from your photo gallery; you must be able to pick out a beautiful scenic one. For Psd Plus can use the “source_mountain.jpg” image (shown below), provided in the “source” file of the Plus download.

Although the image looks pretty good, it does seem to still be missing something. In order to show its tremendous vigor, romantic color, imaginative beauty we’ll add a waterfall to it. The image shown below is available to Psd Plus members as well. Or you could choose your own waterfall image.

Open the waterfall image and Select All (Command + A). Copy and paste on previous as another layer. Under the Layers panel, adjust the Opacity to 75% in order to make visible to place it on a right place.

Go to Edit > Free Transform (Command + T); Click on the bottom-right, drag the handle and hold Shift to resize the waterfall until it is fits the mountain peak. Be sure that they can match perfectly and the water will fall down through the cavern.

Create a layer mask on "Layer 1," and then use a basic brush with smooth edges (black color) to erase some of the parts to make the borders disappear.

To create a layer mask on it. Use the brush sizes shown below. Set up the brushes and erase the waterfalls borders.

After you’ve done that, restore the layer Opacity to 100%. The color of "Layer 1" is different from the “Background” but that’s OK. Press Shift + Command + Alt + E to merge all of the visible layers into a new layer names "Layer 2." Here, you have finished the canvas.

Step 2 – Inking the Paper

Pay attention to five basic elementary inks of traditional Chinese painting shown below: clear, light, weighty, strong and adust.

On "Layer 2" go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur, and set to 5px. Feel out of focus? Don’t worry. Change the layer blend mode to "Soft Light." That’s OK!

Copy "Layer 2" twice (Command + J), and both with "Soft Light." You will get two layers: a "Layer 2 copy" and a "Layer 2 copy 2." The image below shows you the layers in detail.

For another worthy change on this artwork; merge all of the visible layers (Shift + Command + Alt + E) again as "Layer 3." Simultaneity go to Image > Adjustments > Desaturate (Shift + Command + U) to make it looks like a Chinese painting. WOW!

But only a resemblance here, what we want is the similarity in spirit. With the five images shown below, you can find the differences between the layers you’ve just added.

Step 3 – Lighting Up

Traditional Chinese ink painting often expresses her beauty just with blank space. So "light" here is the most crucial thing. However, in our landscape almost all are pictures, the biggest flaw precisely is the difficulty to represent space. (editor：photoshop1)