Real Life to Comic Style Altering

[Physics_Guru]

I took a look through the tutorials to see if I could put a few of them together to learn what I would like to do but cannot find the specifics I am looking for. I did a web search and found a tutorial on it but the writer assumes you know a lot about photoshop and leaves a LOT of steps out.

Anyway, what I would like to do is take a real photo of a person and then convert it to look like a cartoon. This would entail getting rid of all the color (including B&W) to have just the outlines. You would then darken up the outlines for the figure and proceed to coloring. For coloring you would have to lay down base layers and then use the burn / dodge tool to create shadows or highlights on the new comic looking person. To finish it off you would need to use some kind of pattern tool to overlay texture onto the image for the final effects.

I think the coloring and shaows is more of an artistic eye sort of thing. You would have to know where the shadows need to go and all that sort of thing. It would be nice to see this part done in a tutorial though to help with burn / dodge tool use in creating shadows and such.

I guess the tough part would be getting all the fill out of the image and leaving just a darkened outline (this includes all features for eyes, curves, jawlines, ect.).

I think it would be a really neat tutorial and a cool contest for the future once the tutorial is online.

[Chris49]

[QUOTE=Physics_Guru]

I guess the tough part would be getting all the fill out of the image and leaving just a darkened outline [/QUOTE]

Is this what you are looking for-

[Scott]

Honestly, there's no great way to great key lines from a photo unless you do it manually with a brush or the pen tool. Some things you just need to be able to draw to do. There's no filter or combination of filters that will achieve good results.

[libra]

Here is a past contest that you can practise the colouring part on.... http://www.pixeladdiction.com/Closed_contest.php?id=189

To draw something from a photograph into a line image would require a really high resolution to make it look half decent. I agree with Jolt though, it would have to be done manually.

[123456789]

Here's a good way to get an outline of an image.

1- Duplicate your background layer.
2- Desaturate this new layer.
3- Duplicate the new layer.
4- Invert the newest layer.
5- Blend this last layer with 'colour dodge'. Image should be almost blank. Don't panic.
6- Use 'gaussian blur' to blur the top layer (radius = 2 <---play with this.)
Now to add the original colour to the outline,
7- Merge the top 2 layers into one and blend this one with 'luminosity'.

Condensed from a tut I once read somewhere.
Hope this helps.

ps- You might have to paint out the black blotches if your image contains a lot of black.

[Chris49]

if you want to remove the darkened outline you-

On the layer that you want the outlines- go into the "layer styles"
-at the bottiom where it says "this layer" locate the "triandal sliders"
- hold the alt key (or option key) and drag to brake the triandal sliders apart
-drag the wight slider tord the black till your happy

All images are different, So you are going to have to pay with the sliders a bit

I hope this will get you under way :)

BTW 1-9 thats a good tip ;)

[123456789]

Here's an example.
The last image is taken from step no#6 after which I flattened the image, gave it a diffuse filter (anisotropic,) and brought the contrast up to +80.