Photoshop CS3 Converting a Photo to Cartoon

[Flep]

After have seen photo retouch with Photoshop CS3,

In this tutorial we will apply various Photoshop effects to a photograph in order to achieve a cartoon look.

We will start by using this photo:

The first thing we’ll do is make a duplicate of the first layer, which we will be using afterwards.

With the layer selected, press CTRL+J on your keyboard to duplicate.

We will work on this second layer while keeping the original photo hidden below.

What we want to do is get rid of all that detail. So let’s go to Filter > Blur > Surface Blur.

I found that these values worked nicely for the photo used...

Now that some of the detail has been smoothened in our file, we will apply another filter.

Go to Filter > Artistic > Colored Pencil .

For this filter I used the following values:

Pencil Width: 4

Stroke Pressure: 15

Paper Brightness: 50

And obtained the following result:

As you can see most of the color information was lost when we applied this filter.

This is where the duplicate of the original photo will come in handy.

Drag the duplicate layer above the one we’ve been working on up until now and change it’s blending mode to Lighten.

Now duplicate this layer once more.

We will now apply another filter by selecting Filter > Artistic > Cutout.

I used the following values in this filter to retain a bit of the image’s detail:

Number of Levels: 8

Edge Simplicity: 5

Edge Fidelity: 3

Now change this layer’s blending mode to “Pin Light” for the following results:

As you can see we now have a much more detailed image.

However, we want it to look really cartoonish, so we will duplicate the last layer again and apply another filter by going to Filter > Artistic > Poster Edges.

Lower the layer opacity (you can do this in the layers panel or in blending options) to around 40% to obtain this image:

You can choose to stop right here if you want, but you can take it even further if you want to achieve an almost black and white / washed out look by duplicating the layer once again, pressing CTRL+SHIFT+U to discard all color information and change the blending mode to “Hue”.

You can also play with the opacity if you like, I found 80% worked best for me:

If you want to smoothen this result a bit, you can merge all the levels by selecting them all and pressing CTRL+E and then apply Filter -> Stylize > Diffuse and then selecting “Anisotropic”:

Source file: