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The creation of cel-shaded graphics is a lengthy laborious process usually
carried out in
Adobe Illustrator and/or Macromedia Flash by patient professionals. If,
however, you want to bypass all the hard work, and merely require a basic cel-shaded
image for a quick illustration at a pre-defined resolution, then this technique
may be far more useful to you then a fully-fledged vector graphic. Unlike
our hard-edged
cel-shading tutorial, the results of this process have much softer edges and
are more suited to illustrations in printed material.
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Step 1:
Open up a stock image in Photoshop of any size and/or format. The best
results for this tutorial usually involve large images with areas of bright
colours with excellent colour separation. This does not, of course,
exclude more detailed darker images, but getting a pleasing result from an
inferior source image may take a lot more work, and leave you disappointed.
Note: This image was donated by the very kind fabemiko - you can find the
original over
here. |
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Step
2: Before you go any further, Layer > Duplicate Layer the
background layer, hide the new top layer, and select the lower (original)
layer in the layers palette. Now run Blur > Smart Blur and
in the dialog box that pops up, set quality to high and change
the mode to edge only. To define the edges of the image,
adjust the Radius and Threshold values until you have the
ideal mix of desirable edge detail and unwanted static. In my example
to the left, I set the radius to 3, and the threshold to 15.
This will undoubtedly differ for your picture. Once finished, press
OK. |
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Step
3: Invert your layer with Image > Adjustments > Invert and
then clean up your lines by running Filter > Artistic > Cutout.
Again, you will have to play around a bit here to get the best mix of
desirable detail and illustration simplicity. In my example image I
used the following settings:
Number of levels: 7
Edge Simplicity: 4
Edge Fidelity: 2
When satisfied with the preview, press OK, un-hide your top (duplicated)
layer in the layers palette, and make it the currently active layer. |
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Step
4: Now for the bit where we put it all together! Select Filter > Blur > Gaussian
Blur and enter a value that averages out most of the detail. In my
example I used 10px. Press OK, and then go to Edit > Fade Gaussian Blur,
setting the opacity to 100% and the blending mode to
Darken. Press OK. Set the LAYER blending mode to
multiply... or play around a bit with other settings.
Note: If you need illustration images with sections of pure colour,
try using Smart Blur with the mode set to Normal
instead of the Gaussian Blur. |
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Step
5: And its really that simple! You should now merge the
layers together with Layers > Flatten Image and adjust the colours using Image >
Adjustments > Brightness & Contrast to achieve a cleaner brighter feel
with the underlying colours.
Note: If at
this stage your image is exhibiting areas of overly bright or dark colour,
you should ideally go back to steps 2 and 3 & reduce your defining lines as
much as possible. Simply altering the brightness of the image via
Image > Adjustments > Brightness / Contrast will not remove the
differences in overall contrast. |
- Tutorial written by Man1c M0g
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User: Carence (#47802)
Date: Mon Feb 04, 2008. 04:31:19 | Post #6 of 6 |
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Like a marker illustrator style, I have learnt something new again. Thanks !! |
Reply to this post |
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NOTE TO EVERYONE: Follow the picture selection advice....use ther wrong photo and it looks terrible. Use the right one and it's magnificent. |
Reply to this post |
User: skip (#27009)
Date: Mon May 01, 2006. 21:19:13 | Post #4 of 6 |
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this is a great tut. didnt really follow the intructions... but i did great... :D |
Reply to this post |
User: dusk884 (#23476)
Date: Tue Jan 31, 2006. 19:45:18 | Post #2 of 6 |
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Quote from afro: Why did you have to use food? :)
Not that there's anything wrong with it. I'd just like to know
Nice TUT there |
I was curious how this would work since I've never seen a good way to artfully change a photo. I loaded up a high res photograph of a person and used the exact settings as the above tut suggests to try out.
The Results: AMAZING STUFF.. .thanks! |
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