Design, Photography, Teach, Work

Cartoon Yourself In ONE Minute

Looking around for how to quickly turn a photo of myself into a cartoon, well, there’s a lot of crap out there and not much that’s “quick”. So I’ve written a short tutorial on how to cartoon yourself in ONE minutes or so with Photoshop. I’m using Photoshop CS6, but assume it’s similar in other versions.

This is the after photo (thank you to morgueFile for the photo) :

DonCharisma.org-Cartoon-Woman-After

The Basic Technique

1. Open photo in Photoshop

2. DO Filter->Filter Gallery->Poster Edges

3. DO Filter->Filter Gallery->Cutout

4. That’s it DONE !

Advanced Techniques

The cartoon doesn’t always look aesthetically pleasing straight off. Solutions I’ve found are :

1. Up the brightness and contrast before applying the filters, at a ratio of approximately 1 to 3, brightness to contrast. I can’t give exact numbers as it will vary from photo to photo. For my example I didn’t change the brightness or contrast.

2. The Cutout filter has sliders for “Number of Levels”, “Edge Simplicity” and “Edge Fidelity”. Some experimenting with these will lead to a more pleasing result in most case. For my example I used – Levels=4, Simplicity=4 and Fidelity=2

3. Try a different photo taken in different light conditions. Generally well lit daytime shots look better.

4. Post-processing in Photoshop. The basic technique I’ve already shared will give you an excellent starting point on which to build. Use for instance paint brush tool to smooth shaded areas. Healing spot can be used to remove spots of colour in “the wrong place”.

5. You might want to check out my more detailed cartoon yourself tutorials – “How to Cartoon Yourself (or Myself or Whatever) – Two Days of Cartoonification” AND “Miss Charisma – Cartoonize my girlfriend, another two days of cartoonification !“. These techniques require more patience, but the end results are stunning.

6. Check out my “Hire me” page, and contact me if you want us to do it for you.

ENJOY 🙂

This is the exact same before photo I used to create the “after” cartoon, so you can try on the same one as me if you like 🙂

DonCharisma.org-Cartoon-Woman-Before

It’s been cropped to landscape 4:3 from original mourgeFile photo

Resources and Sources

Painted Woman Photo – morgueFile

57 thoughts on “Cartoon Yourself In ONE Minute”

  2. Since I’m already a figment of the imagination I can’t really carton myself, because I don’t think figments cartoon well. Fig Newtons, on the other hand, do quite well as cartoons.

      5. Join the club my friend. It’s a big club apparently. And now that I have started studying again, my time needs to be managed more efficiently.

  7. I’ve heard but never knew. I do have some cool apps on iPhone that do really nice, and I use them on my blogs when I’m showing character reference. I have friends who model for me, and my wife. I’ve been several characters lol, but after wearing a mask, or even going out and taking photos of locations then altering, then turning it into cartoon style changes how it looks. Thanks for the cool info will have to try this too. Does it work well on IPhone?

    1. WEll the tutorial is photoshop on the computer … and yes should work with photos taken on iphone, that’s what I use as my main camera 🙂

      Warm regards

      DC

  8. I have wanted to do this for some time, however, as you may have already discovered I am technically challenged. I’ll give it a go. I didn’t do to well with the sunshades emo either. LOL

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