PS photo production with modern artistic effects

final renderings

1. First find a photo. I found one online - it was nothing special and I didn't search specifically for a nice photo. The techniques described in this article should work for most photos you have on hand. What I'm hoping for is that the photo doesn't have too much clutter in the background. If, unfortunately, the background of your photo is too complex, then you may be better off extracting (keying) the subject and placing it on a white background. I found some retail clothing sites that had exactly the kind of images we needed.

2. OK, when you find the image (or get it from our tutorial page), open it in photoshop and make sure the image mode is RGB mode (menu "Image>Mode>RGB"). Execute "Image > Adjustment > Threshold" to adjust the image threshold. In terms of settings, I chose a position near the center, probably a little to the left. If you turn it to the two extreme settings, it will erase all black or white from the image. That being the case, we should try to preserve as much facial detail as possible.

3. OK, now the effect looks just right, should we stop here? I think it looks a little jagged in places. I want it to look like you drew the vector work and like you didn't apply a photoshop filter to it. So let's apply a Diffusion filter to it to smooth the edges of the image (Filter > Stylize > Diffusion), select "Anisotropic" and click the "OK" button.

4. The above operations should be of some help. But again it leaves a bit of a blur. So execute "Filter>Sharpen>USM Sharpen" again and use the following settings:
Amount=300%, Radius=50 pixels, Threshold=150 Levels

5. OK. If you find that you like the image to be smoother, then you can apply the Diffusion filter again as described above. Now we have completed the retro vector style image. But it doesn't look very nostalgic yet. There's still a lot of coloring to do. Create a new layer below the image and fill it with a linear gradient from the foreground color to the background color. Select RGB(R:255, G:170, B:5) as the foreground color and RGB(R:255, G:102, B:0) as the background color. Applies a gradient from top to bottom of the image. Now select the image layer and change its layer blending mode to "Soft Light".

6. Now we have the desired effect. Finally, under the nostalgic image layer, I added a nice pixel pattern fill effect. Below is my finished effect.

(Translator's Note: The fill pattern unit used here can refer to the picture below)

7. Here is an example of applying some other effects to add mood. I applied some pixel stretching techniques on the sides and used some high contrast colors for the background.