Sometimes, or rather very often, I’ve no inspiration on the post-editing for the photo that I took, especially those that do not have strong theme or early planning ahead.

There’s a trick that I’ve learned sometime back on the internet (can’t recall the website) show how the Color Match in Photoshop can be useful to tweak your photo to match with famous art work. I have trial and find it really useful. It really change the photo characteristic and sometime it spike my creativity and bring the photo back to life or give it another level of altitude.

What it does is to bring the color theme from the art painting and match with your photo, that change the mood of the photo dramatically. For example:

The original photo:

Color match with painting of Eugène Delacroix - La liberté guidant le peuple:

Color match with painting of Leonardo da Vinci - Mona Lisa:

Color match with painting of Hokusai - The Great Wave off Kanagawa:

As you can see, the photo has show it’s potential at a different level, I could of course using the photoshop to achieve this result via many steps, but the main idea is to take on what the artist has been working hard in their life time on the colour study, and perhaps, from this practice we could learned more from the artist view point of color.

To do this, you first collect a set of art work from various artist that you like, and here is the Photoshop steps:

  1. Open the both photos (yours and the art work) in photoshop
  2. On your photos, select Image > Adjustments > Match Color
  3. In the dialogue box, select the art work from the pull down menu under Source (near the bottom area), and tweak the 3 option in the Image Option, my choice is always start from Luminance: 200%, Color Intensity: 200%, Fade: 25%. You may have your own preferences, which ever that work for you.
  4. Click “OK” once you are happy with the result

That all. Simple and yet effective. Of course not every painting sample works fine for every photos, it’s really try and error and open mind for the possibility.