A special note about my "From a Photo" tutorials
When working with photos in PSP, the larger your image, the less effect the native PSP or outside filters will have on the image. With a larger image, you have to increase the numbers of the effect you're using in order for it to make a change on the image.
In order to keep the loading times of my tutorial pages as short as possible, I rarely work on anything that's more than 400px on the largest side (prior to framing)....occasionally I'll go up to 475, but that's about it. So, take that into account when you do any of my photo tuts if you want to achieve a similar result.
Here is an example of what we will be making.
In order to do this tutorial you will need the following items:
A. Paint Shop Pro - You can get it here:
B. The Crisscross.bmp. You probably installed this .bmp with PSP8 (look in the textures folder), but in case you didn't, I've made it available for you Here. Download the zip file, unzip it and place Crisscross.bmp in the following folder: My Documents>My PSP8 Files>Textures.
C. A suitable photograph. I got the one I used from this site..
Let's begin!
1. Open up the photograph you want to turn into a watercolor, duplicate it (Shift+D) and close the original. If your image is larger than what you want your finished painting to be, resize it now. (Image>Resize)
2. Go to Adjust>Add Remove Noise>Edge Preserving Smooth. I used a smoothing amount of 8 on my image, but this will vary depending on the image you've chosen to work on. The effect you're trying to achieve is a softening and blurring of the edges. As an example, here's the before and after from a section of my photo while step 2 was being applied.
3. Go to Effects>Edge Effects>Enhance.
4. On your layers palette, right-click on the background layer and choose Duplicate. Go to Adjust>Blur>Gaussian Blur. I used a Radius of 2.00.
5. Go to Adjust>Negative Image.
6. Go back to your layers palette and change the layer blend mode to Overlay, then lower the layer opacity to 90%.
7. Go back once more to your layers palette, right-click on any layer and select Merge Visible.
8. Go to Adjust>Hue and Saturation>Hue/Saturation/Lightness, and make adjustments to the Saturation and Lightness in order to get a more "painterly" effect. These are the settings I used:
Note: I repeated the Hue/Saturation/Lightness a second time on my Victorian House photo, because I didn't think it looked enough like a watercolor after the first time. This step will vary greatly depending on both the image you use, and your own personal preferences.
Do it any way you want to. After all, it's your painting.
9. The Final Step! Go to Effects>Texture Effects>Texture. Click on the arrow over the texture window and find the Crisscross texture that you downloaded, then click on it. Change your other settings to match those in the screenshot.
Your Watercolor is finished. Sign it and add a frame of your choice, then send it to someone who loves you.....<VBG>
Here's the result my friend "Mur" got on a photograph of a apples. It really looks like a painting doesn't it?
I hope you enjoyed this tutorial.
Please sign my guestbook so I'll know you were here. 
This tutorial is my own creation, any similarity to any other tutorial on the Internet is unintentional. It is copyrighted by me, *~Nightshadow~*, on June 22, 2005, and is not to be copied or reproduced in any way under penalty of law. Graphics lists, please e-mail me for permission to post my tutorials, especially because I would love to see the results :O)
NOTE: Any image you make using this tutorial is completely your own property.
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