Adobe Photoshop in 60 Seconds: Create an Easy Watercolor Effect With Actions

Final product image — What You'll Be Creating

Welcome to our Photoshop in 60 Seconds series, in which you can learn a Photoshop skill, feature, or technique in just a minute!

Adobe Photoshop in 60 Seconds: Watercolor Effect

Do you love watercolor paintings? You can achieve your own masterful traditional art pieces just by using a Photoshop Action to transform your photography. Browse the amazing selection of Photoshop Actions on GraphicRiver to create more awesome photo effects.

In this quick video, I'll show you how to use this simple Watercolor Painting Action to transform this beautiful tiger below.

How to Create a Watercolor Effect in Photoshop

Open your photo into Photoshop. I'll be using this lovely Tiger Stock from Pixabay.

Pixabay Tiger stock — Tiger Stock via Pixabay.

Now access your Actions panel by going to Window > Actions. Select Load Actions from the drop down options to use the Watercolor Painting Action.

Make sure your photo is set as the original Background Layer and press Play. The action will instantly turn your photo into a watercolor painting with the results created in a New Group.

Open this group to tweak the different Adjustment Layer settings. Increase the contrast with Levels, or tweak the colors for the Gradient Map.

Adjust the Watercolor Effect with Adjustment Layers

Here is the final result below:

Watercolor Painting Effect Photoshop Tutorial

Want to see this in action? Check out the video above to see this lesson at work!

A Bit More Detail

Learn how to create more photo effects from our experts. Check out these great tutorials below:

60 Seconds?!

This is part of a series of quick video tutorials on Envato Tuts+ in which we introduce a range of subjects, all in 60 seconds—just enough to whet your appetite. Let us know in the comments what you thought of this video and what else you'd like to see explained in 60 seconds!