pixel portraits

February 5, 2009 3:51 PM

Can anyone explain or know a tutorial that shows how to create pixel portraits from photos such as these?

http://pixeltemple.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/shauninman/2296546360/sizes/l/

posted by nyu2 to Media & Arts (6 answers total)

I've seen some Photoshop filters that sort of do this, but it requires a bit of work to get the cartoon/pixel effect.

The easiest way I can think of is:

1. take your source photo and scale it down to 10-20% of its original size
2. import this photo into Illustrator and use the Trace tool to get a rough idea of your pixels and lines
3. manually manipulate each "pixel" in Illustrator to meet you desired end result

Try some of these tutorials: http://www.tutorialized.com/search.php?s=tracing
posted by camworld at 4:09 PM on February 5, 2009

I'd be very surprised if your examples were done in any kind of automated way. Most likely they were drawn. You know, by people.
posted by jjg at 4:13 PM on February 5, 2009

Here's an okay-ish tutorial that I found with a cursory search. But I think essentially you'll need some basic portrait drawing knowledge, and a fair bit of pixel pushing.

To get started you could try resizing your photos down to an appropriate size, and drawing the outlines over them in single-pixel black line. You may find it takes a bit of trial and error to get the details looking right, especially as these are basically caricatures. Even a single pixel change can make a huge difference at this scale. Just keep zooming back out to look at the drawing from a distance as you go.

For lighter areas, such as blonde hair, try outlining them in a darker shade of the colour instead of black.
posted by lucidium at 4:20 PM on February 5, 2009

I used to do this sort of thing. A step not mentioned yet is reducing the colour palette right down to 4, 8, 16, or 32 colours total. Disable dithering when doing this.

But as mentioned, the usual way to get that hand-drawn look is to... do a lot of it by hand.
posted by -harlequin- at 4:37 PM on February 5, 2009

You could try this in photoshop.
Image>Mode>Indexed colour - colors = 15 (trial & error) , dither = none
Image>Mode>RGB (elsewise you can't do the next step)
Filter>pixelate>mosaic - cellsize = 28 square (trial & error)

It won't give you exactly what you want (ie an avatar like portrait) but you can work from it. I wonder too, if it might be helpful before you start the process, to put a border around the face and features in black, so that will pixelate as well.
posted by b33j at 6:19 PM on February 5, 2009

Here's a tutorial. The "style" is more realistic than cartoony, but it should give you some ideas. Here's one more.

Things like mosaic/posterize/autotrace will give you some ideas on how to isolate shapes and colors, but like others have said you pretty much have to do it by hand.
posted by O9scar at 8:20 PM on February 5, 2009