Article by Ey@el

Original en français

As Andy Warhol once said, “everyone will be famous for 15 minutes”. I discovered this very user-friendly technique while experimenting to create a unique and stylised user pic that would look like a Pop art painting. I know some of you are dying to try so here's how I made it. As always, you may use any image editing software running under Windows and supporting .8bf such as Paint Shop Pro (the one I used), Photoshop, PhotoFiltre, etc. If you want to use freeware, XnViewMP supports them and runs on every platform. The GIMP (Linux, Windows) may also run some .8bf filters via a plug-in you'll need to install first.

Materials

- a colour or b/w picture providing good contrast

- a collection of external free filters to install in the Plugins folder of your image editing software before lauching it — we'll use the one only:

US Comic

Instructions

1. Open a copy of the image you wish to manipulate.

2. Resize it if it's too large (most blogs and forums have a maximum size for user pix) and crop it to a square shape.

3. Apply Filter Factory - US Comic filter:

Even bias = 98
Odd bias = 148
Stripe size = 0
Darkness = 77
Gray <-> Color = 166
Red = 249
Green = 209
Blue = 151

4. To improve the result, I've decreased saturation and increased luminosity and contrast.

NOTE: You need to adapt the settings to your picture, but you must make sure to always keep the strip size value to 0 otherwise you'll get scanlines which is not what we want for this style of graphics. After processing, you may alter colours like I did with my own photo where I turned red to pink using the Color Replacer tool.

For the above picture, I've just changed the filter settings and left the saturation, luminosity and contrast untouched. I've erased the original text on the sheet of paper (painting it white) to rewrite it more clearly so that it would match the rest of the picture.

The possibilities are endless and the output is so cool I guess you'll have a lot of fun along the way!

Ey@el

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