— It’s already awesome being able to produce a stunning sketch or paint effect with a pro-designed artistic template and few clicks of the mouse. But this should only be your starting point. The best results come when you dive into the layers and finesse the material to make it all exactly the way you want it to look.

After producing a tutorial featuring a fantastic piece by beloved artist Billa Bozem for the students in “AWAKE: Living the Photo Artistic Life,” I decided to take the finished piece and give it a test run in one of the incredible artistic effect templates created by Dave Seeram of PhotographyBB. These are cunningly designed templates (not Actions) employing Smart Objects in Photoshop; so with no brushes to install and no masks to paint they’re an absolute breeze to employ, and in a matter of moments the results on the screen already looked awesome.

But what makes these templates especially powerful is the flexibility they give you in customizing the end results.

Each template contains a host of different things you can tinker with, yet the templates all function similarly. So after seeing Billa’s piece rendered as a fantastic sketch with only a few clicks, I decided to immediately record a second tutorial as I dove into the file and went through some of the ways the image can then be modified.

The resulting tutorial was so much fun to make (and I think so universally valuable to anyone using these templates), I decided to publish it here on the blog:

IDave Seeram has actually created a brand new collection of artistic effects meant to replicate the styles of various famous artists — and the DaVinci sketch effect is especially amazing. you should definitely check out this new collection by clicking here . . . For the next couple days you can even grab the complete set — filled with a bunch of different sketch and paint effects — at a great discount. (Dave Seeram set this up just for my students.)

These artistic templates are such a blast to play with. And the results are amazing.

Whether you run completed compositions through these effects at the end as a way of pushing a piece over the top . . . or run various photos through an effect before bringing those elements onto a canvas where you intend to composite them together and then carry it all further . . . There’s SO much you can do with these things.

You really do need these in your creative arsenal.

I especially love the idea of being able to merge everything at the end of a composition . . . carry that merged image over into one of the templates (try one of those painterly templates!) . . . and then bring the finished result back over into the original piece, where you can then selectively blend and mask the two together using various artistic brushes . . .

The possibilities are endless.

What’s more, given how flexible these templates are in terms of what you can accomplish with them, you’re going to be enjoying these effects for years and years to come.

I rarely promote anything, as you know. But if you love creating artistic compositions in Photoshop, this collection of creative effects gets my highest recommendation.

You’re going to love working with these. They’re so much fun. And you’ll learn a lot by spending time manipulating the resulting layers in Photoshop as you dial in your own spectacular results.

Enjoy!

~ Sebastian

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Note: These templates make use of Smart Objects and various adjustment layers and masks that require the use of Photoshop for them to work properly. They’re golden for every version of Photoshop from CS6 to CC (current version) But they don’t work in Adobe Elements. So if you’re using Elements still … sorry!