Photoshop filters

July 8, 2005 8:26 AM

I'm creating a book for a nephew's upcoming 5th birthday. I want to use photos I have of him and his family as the illustrations, altered in Photoshop to look more like illustrations (like a normal kids' book) than photos, but I'm not so good with the filters...

I've used Photoshop some (4.0 at home, CS at work), but the filters offer so many options; I'm just randomly choosing settings. Could someone suggest a trick or two that will produce good results, or point me to a resource online that shows examples of what various filters can do?

posted by donnagirl to computers & internet (7 comments total)

Simple but excellent method for turning a photo into a watercolor-like image.

Other techniques.
posted by planetkyoto at 8:40 AM on July 8, 2005

There really isn't a good way to make things look like illustrations rather than just tracing the photos and rescanning them. Anything else looks like a photo run through multiple filters, and most of the filters designed to look like you're hand illustrating them really just make your pictures look like mid-90s photo-manipulation crap (like the "artistic" charcoal or bas relief filters). Sorry.
What you might want to do is use the posterize to make it look like paper cut-outs or something similar. Personally, I'd print the photos and trace them, then rescan them.
posted by klangklangston at 9:04 AM on July 8, 2005

Ah, I take that back. The watercolor filter mentioned in the first comment did seem to work pretty well. It totally wasn't what I was thinking of for illustration, but it looks all right.
posted by klangklangston at 9:17 AM on July 8, 2005

I do like that watercolor effect - thanks, planetkyoto! And, klang, I appreciate that you don't want my result to look like something crappy from 1994. Me neither. (My nephew, however, wasn't around for the 90's and wouldn't notice the resemblance.) I just wanted something one step better than "I rough pasteled all of these photos".
posted by donnagirl at 9:34 AM on July 8, 2005

There are a number of actions here with examples.
posted by undertone at 10:04 AM on July 8, 2005

I've done some great illustration-like images with a filter called India Ink from Flaming Pear Software. If you want color images, you can use the sketch-like result of this filter to layer over a blurry copy of the original- things like that. Good luck with the project!
posted by BoringPostcards at 10:09 AM on July 8, 2005

Plasq's Comic Life will let you make comics out of your photos.
posted by ldenneau at 4:59 PM on July 8, 2005