Today’s Post by Joe Farace
I enjoy reading comic books and creating a cartoon effect in Photoshop with your own photographs has never been easier. All you need is the right software. In this case it’s PanosFX’s “Cartoons and Pop Art” from my old friend Panos Efstathiadis, a relatively new advertiser here on the car photography blog. Most of how the process works is covered in my post, Working in Toontown: Cartoon Portraiture, which features a cartoon portrait. If you’ve already read that you can skip the rest of this post, but if you haven’t read on…
The Cartoons and Pop Art actions uses a combination of Photoshop filters and advanced features to create it’s effects. The actions are easy to use; one click on and you’re quickly presented with different versions of your original photo. You can select and save the one you like or all of them. The original image is kept on a separate layer and you can blend the two layers together to create another variation.
Panos tells me the actions work best with images from four to eight megapixels but I’ve used larger images, like today’s featured photo. If your image is larger or smaller, he recommends using Image > Image size to resize it (on 3:2 or 4:3 photos, set the width from 2500 to 3500px.) If you use PSD or PNG images that have transparency, the transparent areas will be preserved.
PanosFX’s actions can also create 16 different speech balloons that he designed in Illustrator, to give the software the sharpness of vector graphics.
Another feature of the action is the ability to create collages. The actions can produce two different collages, with four and nine photos and customizable colors. The size of these collages is four and nine times the original photo’s size; this lets you create large format prints for your friends or clients.
The actions are available for all of Photoshop’s various versions as well as Photoshop Elements for the same price: $17.90.
How I made this shot: I took this photo with my Olympus Pen E-P3 and the poorly rated Olympus 15mm f/8 Body Cap lens. Exposure was 1/2500 sec at f/8 and ISO 640. You can read about how good this “bad lens” in the post: Is This the Worst Mirrorless Lens Ever?
And if you think making cartoons out of car photographs is a dumb idea, just remember that the motto of this site, as well as my main blog, is to “have fun with your photography.” And making car-toons is fun.
If you enjoyed today’s blog post and would like to treat me to a cup of Earl Grey tea ($2.50), please click here. And if you do, thanks so much.