First attempt at painting with Photoshop

This is a photo of Ballston beach down the Cape (Cape Cod) that I practised painting with Photoshop CS5 using the new Mixer brush and some other brushes.

It was fun to do, but I am not brave enough yet to try without a photo.

I did it

I bought the upgrade: Photoshop CS5. I have been playing with it, and learning the new features. I do believe some of them will change the way some photographers can work with their shots.

Here is the before shot. I want to remove the car in the background and remove the people playing on the rocks. I also wanted to make the shot less 'snapshot' like by cropping, and boost up the color a bit. This original shot is a film photo, scanned onto my computer using Photoshop CS5.

Using the cropping tool, which has a great grid feature, content aware fill (new), the spot healing brush tool with content aware (new) and the clone stamp tool, I was able to get rid of the car and those pesky tourists. Great new features I think I will use alot of since I like to do photo retouching.