First time up to bat and I don't want to overwhelm y'all, so this is a short an easy lesson. With the help of kilch123, cumminalong, bigriver, and mtdodge I'll walk you through how to make a photo look like a cartoon image.
step 1open your image in photoshop. For the tutorial, we'll be using one of kilch's photos.
step 2copy the background layer by selecting it and hitting
ctrl+j. Your layers panel should look something like this.
step 3select the new layer and go to
filter>artistic>poster edges and apply the settings shown. These are just suggested settings that I have found work very well. Note that they won't be perfect for every image, so feel free to play around and see what they do. Here, I've set the edge thickness and edge intensity to 4 and posterization to 3.
step 4Now we need to brighten up the image. Select the now posterized layer (should be titled layer 1) and select
image>adjustments>brightness/contrast. I've set the brightness to 15 and the contrast to 25. This step is completely optional, but I find that adding a little brightness and contrast makes a better looking cartoon.
step 5Now lets duplicate this layer by selecting it (should be layer 1) and hitting
ctrl+j. This will allow us to repeat step 6 with different settings until we find one we like. This step is really just a time saver when your experimenting around. You should now have a layer panel that looks like this.
step 6select the new layer (should be layer 1 copy) and
select filter>artistic>cutout and apply the following settings. number of levels 4, edge simplicity 2, and edge fidelity 3. Again, you can just play around with these until you find what you like. I've ran several passes to come up with these for kilch's image. Using the layer created in step 5, this process can be repeated and you can have a side by side comparison to help you decide which settings you like best.
here is the final imageThat's it, kilch's truck has been successfully cartoonized!
here are a few other examples of members trucksand to prove you can do this with any image, mt's dogThat concludes lesson 1 of photoshop 101
cheers,