Creating Lichtenstein Inspired Portraits From Your Child’s Photograph
This is a guest post on Creating Lichtenstein Inspired Portraits is by Shalet Abraham from My Baby Photos
Roy Lichtenstein is an artist famous for his pop art Ben-Day dots. This tutorial will teach you to replicate Lichtenstein’s style incorporating Ben-Day dots, line drawings and digital coloring techniques. It may sound complicated but it’s really just a simple step-by-step process. When finished you’ll have a personal pop art portrait worthy of display.
Photoshop Tool Bar
- Open photoshop and open the photograph you wish to work with.
- Make a duplicate copy of the the photograph (Layer –> Duplicate Layer). Title it “initial portrait”
- Create a new layer (Layer –> New). Drag this layer between the two photographic layers on the layers palette. Use the paint bucket tool to fill this layer with the background color of your choice. Don’t worry - the color can always be changed later if it is not to your liking.
- With the initial portrait layer highlighted use the pen tool to cut out your subject and remove the background (see this pen tool tutorial for details).
- After your background is removed make a duplicate layer of the initial portrait layer (Layer –> Duplicate Layer) only this time open it as a new file.
- Convert the image to grayscale (Image–>Mode–>Grayscale)
- Apply the halftone pattern filter (Filter –> Sketch–>Halftone Pattern)
- Re-convert image to RGB color (Image–>Mode–>RGB Color).
- Make a duplicate layer of the image but place back in original document (note my original document was titled “other”). You may now close the separate dot file (you won’t need to use it anymore).
Placing new duplicate copy in original file
- Hide the initial portrait layer by clicking on the eye in the layers palette.
- Highlight the dot layer and change to “multiply”
- Click on the “New Fill Layer” button on the bottom middle of the layers palette and click on solid color.
- Click on foreground color and switch the color to black. Use the paint bucket tool to fill with black (the background color should appear around the photo).
- Switch the foreground color to white. Click the paintbrush tool. Use the paintbrush to color your image.
- Repeat steps 14-16 until your picture is completely colored in.
- Highlight the Dots layer and adjust the opacity to achieve a pleasing effect
How to open a duplicate layer as a new file
Your picture will look like this:
New duplicate image removed from background
Convert to grayscale
The prompt will ask “Discard color information?”; respond Yes.
Your picture will look like this:
Picture after converted to grayscale
Halftone Pattern Filter
Your picture will look like this:
Halftone pattern filter
Click the fit on screen button in the lower left hand corner to see your whole picture then adjust the size and contrast sliders to get the effect you want. Be sure the pattern type is dots. Hit OK when finished.
Fit on screen button
Halftone Pattern Sliders
Make another duplicate layer of the dot layer and title it “white” (open it within the same document). Go to Image–>Adjustments–>Brightness/Contrast. Adjust the brightness to 100% and contrast to -100%. On this layer your subject should be white. Drag the white layer just above the “colored background” layer.
Now you need to create a clipping path between the “white” and “colored background” layers. Hold down the alt key and run the cursor between the paths on the layers palette until you get two bubbles. When the two bubbles appear click to create a clipping path (indicated by a downward arrow).
Clipping path between layers
Now you’re ready to color!
This will open a new layer. Choose the color you want to start drawing with - usually the lips or eyes (don’t worry — this color is also easily changed). Drag this new layer just above the white layer. Create a clipping path between these two layers.
Your picture will look something like this:
Colored Photo
You’re almost finished!
You can stop here or you can take this one step further and add line art over the top. If you wish to add line art, click on the “initial portrait” layer and make a duplicate copy opening it in a new file. Then follow this tutorial to create a cartoon drawing from your photograph. When finished make another duplicate copy and place as the top layer over your Lichtenstein-inspired portrait. Your final result will look like this:
And there you have it! Lichtenstein-inspired pop art from your own photographs. Print on canvas and proudly display your art for friends and family!
Tags: Lichtenstein, Photoshop
Removing Partial Color from a Photo: Photoshop Techniques
While there are lots of ways that you can convert an image into black and white in Photoshop sometimes you want to remove some of the color but not all of it.
One method to do this, is to use a tool such as an adjustment layer to remove the saturation from the image or to apply a black to white gradient map adjustment. This removes all the color and you can then recover some of it by reducing the opacity of the adjustment layer to show some of color from the image layer underneath. However, when you adjust opacity, the setting is applied to every pixel in the image so light and dark pixels are treated equally.
You can achieve a richer effect by using the image as its own mask so that the desaturation effect is applied with different strengths to pixels in the image depending on their relative lightness or darkness.
To see how this effect can be achieved:
Step 1
Open a new image and add an adjustment layer to convert it to black and white. I used Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Gradient Map and used the Black, White gradient from the basic set of gradients.
Step 2
Click the Adjustment Layer’s layer mask to select it – this is the white box in the Layer palette to the right of the Adjustment layer thumbnail. Choose Image > Apply Image. This tool lets you apply the image to itself as a layer mask. The current image name should appear in the Source Image area and you need to apply it to the Merged layer. Experiment with selecting and deselecting the Invert checkbox, if you have Preview selected you’ll see how each setting affects the image. Choosing Invert typically gives the best looking results and it’s the option I chose. Click Ok to add the image as its own layer mask.
Step 3
Inspect the image and let’s talk about what’s happening. The screenshot here shows the mask (not the resulting image). You can toggle the mask’s visibility on and off by Alt + Click (Option + Click on the Mac) on the Layer Mask thumbnail in the Layers palette.
Masks are grayscale so they’re always black, white or shades of gray. They work like this: where they are white, the current layer is shown – that’s the black and white conversion in this example. Where the mask is black, we are seeing through the current layer to the colored layer below. Where the mask is grey we’re seeing some partial transparency in the black and white layer so some color is showing.
Here the mask is dark in the sky area and around two of the buildings on the left so you’re seeing some blue in the sky and color in the buildings in this area. Where the mask is white, the image is almost all desaturated.
So you can see how subtly different the results are using this method, here’s the original image, the version we just created using the Apply Image command and another version showing the result with the same Gradient Map adjustment layer but this time with a reduced opacity and no layer mask. The significant differences are in the sky which is bluer and the grass which is more desaturated in our example – a result you cannot achieve by simply adjusting the opacity.
Tip
Masks can be adjusted just like regular layers. So, you can create more variety in the mask by clicking on it, and choose Image > Adjustments > Levels. Adjust the levels to suit – if you lighten the mask you’ll make it whiter overall which means the image will become more black and white and less colorful. If you darken the mask then you will see more of the colored image below.
If you are curious to learn more about the Gradient Map adjustment layer, check out this recent post on Gradient Maps for more on how it works and how to use it.
Tags: Apply Image, Photoshop