This stopped being a photograph for me the second it hit the board in photoshop, mostly because I feel like it's unfinished AS a photograph--namely because of the blur. But it's NOT unfinished as a portrait of an unfinished painting!
A brief description (with vague details):
-First things first: Levels and smart sharpen with a gaussian blur effect. I cranked the thing way, way up.
-I bled the color using Photoshop's drippy watercolor brush (which turned out to be my weapon of choice) by turning down the opacity to about 70%, selecting white for my color and using saturation, hue and color for my brush blend styles. This fluxuated as needed in order to get the effects I wanted. By fluctuated, I mean that I adjusted the opacity anywhere from 30-70% in some places.
-Then, looking at the original, I added the colors BACK by base--blue for water, autumn hues for the trees and whatnot. You can see the flucuations in the fullness of color, as the left side of the portrait is more complete than the rest.
-To give it that "painted" feeling, I raised my opacity and used a normal brush type to spalsh a few deeper hues onto the upper right section of the frame and left them there.
-That left the bird and the tree behind him. I bled all the color there.
-Now for the fun part: Duplicated layer >> type: Overlay. Made it darker.
-Used a watercolor filter on the top layer, then backed it down as needed by adjusting the opacity of the layer.
-Applied a gradient with a dark blue on the left and white on the right to suck the color out just a bit more and give a more complete feel to the left side.
-Finally, to help get the green reflections out of the waterfall, I drew a box around it and did a selective hue / saturation drain on the greens. The graident I'd done before did most of the worth, and photoshop didn't want to read the leaves as green. So I tweaked it a little more with color balance.
And there you have it--I think.
Enjoy!