In this episode I'll show you how
to use Photoshop filters
to turn your normal photos
into cartoon caricatures and more.
Hi everybody welcome to another episode
of Exploring Photography
right here on AdoramaTV.
Adorama! It's the place that
has everything for photographers like
you and me.
Well in this week
we're going to take a deep dive
into Photoshop filters,
so we're going to be taking normal
photos and creating some really
painterly effects and some sort of crazy
cartoon caricatures.
Now I have to say
this is an intermediate to advanced
tutorial, so if you're not familiar with
some basics in Photoshop
specifically layers, layer mask, Smart Objects
and some basic shortcut keys
you might want to have a little refresher.
Now the cool thing is all the techniques
that I've covered here including the photos
that I'm using to create these crazy
characters are all in past episodes
of AdoramaTV
and so check out the links
in the description of this video. There's
tons of information this week
in the description of this video,
so make sure you check it out.
Again check out the description of video
there's a lot of extra info that will help you get up
to speed with the stuff
that we're going to be doing here today.
Now the way this works
it's sort of like making a pizza,
we're going to have a lot of different
ingredients. Those ingredients are the
filters in Photoshop. Things like the
Liquify Filter, Adobe Camera Raw filter
the High Pass Filter
the Gradient Maps
and then also we're going to be using
Nik Analog Effects Pro 2
to do all of this kind of stuff,
again if you don't know
about this stuff,
I've covered it in the past,
check out the links in the description
of this video,
but we're going to take each of those filters
and like making a pizza,
some pizzas you know,
have all the ingredients,
it's the deluxe
super supreme pizza
and it has everything.
So in our equivalent that
would be a photo that has all of the
filters but sometimes when you make
a pizza you just want a couple
of little things on there
and so the same thing
holds true of this technique,
you might only use one or two
of these filters but the technique
is the same for all of them.
It starts with the base
and then we build
on that base using different filters
and so let's see exactly
how that works
and dive into Photoshop right now.
Here are some images that I've been working on
and they all have one thing in common.
Let's start with the source images,
these are all high contrast images
with a solid background.
Now this is the kind of image
that works best with this technique,
you can try other types of photos
but in my experience
this is what's going to work
absolutely the best.
So all of these are sort of layered
exactly the same.
You've got your first image
with a solid background
that is adjusted for the tonality
and all that kind of stuff
in Lightroom or Photoshop,
however you want to do that.
The next thing is in Photoshop
you use Nik software to add
some texture and to over sharpen this
to get it ready for the next step
which is to warp everything
and make this into a cartoony caricature
and you can see this
really looks sort of crazy.
It's this oil painting kind of a wacky effect.
You can see that we have the same thing
here's Gavin, this is the image out of the
camera. We've added that texture
and then we're going to distort
and warp and make him this mad man
and I love how this looks.
This really looks cartoony,
it's really sort of evil
and nasty. The next thing we have
is something like this so
this is Boleyn, she's got a beautiful
face so I don't want to distort her face
it's just too good-looking,
so all we'll do is we're going
to add this effect
and when we zoom in on this
at a 100% you can see that this really
is a pleasing effect and you can see how
this makes the hair and everything sort
of wavy, it's really awesome
or you can do something like this;
so this is Nadia
she looks great just like this
and so all I've done here is add the texture
but I've left her eyes and her skin
pretty much the same. I just want to have
this sort of cartoony effect on her hair
so it's not a caricature. It's more of an
artistic interpretation of the image
or you can even do a little bit less.
So this is Saurian, so when we zoom in here
this is the original image. I'm going to go
and show you what I did
which is I cartooned
up her hair and the background
but I left her face alone and so you can see
before and after. This is something
that's just a little crazy effect maybe
this would be great for a cosplay kind
of a photoshoot where you can distort
and cartoon up maybe the hair
and the clothing but not the face itself so
let's walk through how to do this.
So for our demo today,
what we're going to do is
we're going to take this image
that I shot in a previous episode
of Exploring Photography
of Gavin Hoey and we're going to cartoon him up
and make him really sort of crazy,
so the first thing we need
to do is in Lightroom;
right click and we're going to say
edit in Photoshop CC 2018.
Now the first thing I need to mention;
I set the white balance and all the tonality
and did all of my Corrections in Lightroom first,
so that's done. Now we're just bringing that over
into Photoshop. Okay the first thing we
want to do over here,
is we want to take a copy of the background layer
and then I need to add that texture.
To do that I'm going to go into my filters
Nik collection Analog Effects 2,
again I did an entire video
on how to do this exact
thing, in fact I'm using the filter
that I created in that video. It's called the
Gav Max and so I'm going to take this right
here, this is my filter called Gav Max
and you can see that it is adding
this texture here so there's this dirt
and scratches that's what's adding that
and then I've got some basic adjustments
and so if you want to do this
just get in there make sure
you watch that video
on how to create this specific filter
and this will work just for you so I'm going to
hit OK and then that's going to bring
that back into Photoshop as a new layer
and that's going to be titled
analog effects Pro 2.
All right there it is so
it's a Gav Max
that's the name of the filter
and analog effects Pro 2.
That's what that means right there,
so I've got that that looks pretty cool, the next
thing I want to do is I want to copy
that layer so that I can add some
filters. I'm going to rename that I'm
going to name it filters and I'm going
to convert this to a Smart Object.
The reason I'm going to do that is because
I want to start creating a bunch
of filters and layering them and I want to
be able to go back in time and change
things if needed.
So the first thing I want to do here
is I'm going to go to my filters,
go to my Camera Raw filter
and I need to really make this contrasty.
I'm going to do that by adding clarity so
I'm going to bring that up to about 20,
something like that that looks good
remember you can adjust this to your
taste. Don't do exactly what I'm doing.
Now I forgot to do something,
okay because this is a smart object,
I can just go into the Camera Raw filter
here, I need to change some tonality
things I'm going to go get my adjustment
brush, I'm going to take my highlights
down by about 20, 23
I'm going to paint down
Gavin's hands so they're a little bit
darker, I did this in a previous video
you can check that out and then I'm
going to take my highlights up just up
stick that down, create a new brush,
take the highlights up a little bit
and brighten up Gavin's face here,
yeah something like that.
Let's take those highlights up
just a little bit more,
good to create a new
brush, take the highlights down,
paint down his forehead.
That's good okay so
I've just changed my tonality a little bit,
that's why we want
a Smart Object so if you forget
something you can go back and make
adjustments. The next thing we're going
to do here is this is the fun part,
we're going to liquify Gavin's face.
This is where we make him really cartoony
and so what I'm going to do here
is I'm just going to get my liquify tool
and go in and the first
thing I'll do here is I'll use this
bloat tool, I'll do that on his eyes to
make his eyes really big,
make these goggles really big,
just sort of making
this larger then I'm going to use my normal
forward warp tool and I'm going to start
making his face really distorted
so I'm taking his cheeks in like this,
I'm going to
take his jaw way out like this.
I'm making sort of crazy, I'm going to pucker
that a little bit, whoops wrong one,
yeah this way just nose a little bit smaller
I'll make his hands a little bit larger
so you can do this to your taste, all
we're trying to do is make him cartoony
and distorted so a larger hands go in
here I want to add some texture,
some wave to this cloth,
you'll see why as we
start doing this so maybe just a little
bit more of craziness and then bring his
head and make his head a little bit
smaller I'm getting this weird
kind of tear up here
because I'm moving the material around,
that's okay because you
can replace that using this reconstruct tool
and so I'll just reconstruct this bit
that I've messed up. Now this is something you can
play with quite a bit
and I suggest that you do it
just come in and play and try
to make something cartoony
if you don't really know what to do
to somebody's face to make them cartoony
look at some caricatures online
just search for that
look at some cartoons
get some comic books
from your kids and then just take
a look at how those things are distorted
it's really fun okay that's enough for
that I'm going to say okay.
Now the thing I need to do after this
is I need to add a little bit more contrast
if you can believe it,
so I'm going to go back to my
filter I'm going to go back to my
Camera Raw filter and again we're going to use
that clarity slider, now I'm going to do
this on top of what we've already done.
That's really getting contrasty,
I'll save okay
and blammo! There we have that.
Now the next thing we need to do
and this is where it gets to be super cartoony,
if you're going to go to filter and then
we're going to stylize this,
we're going to go
to oil paint.
now this depending on the speed of your
computer, it can take a little while,
so I suggest that you turn off preview
and just use this little window
up here to see exactly what's happening
and then once you get to something that looks
okay then turn on preview
and see the entire thing.
The other thing I need to
mention, I'm going to hit cancel on this,
this is best
viewed at a 100%
so zoom in to 100%
before you start doing this so
again I'm going to go back to my filter
here and I'm going to go to stylize,
oil paint okay so now that we're going to do
here is we're going to take a look at
what this is doing and what I've found
just by trial and error is that these
sliders all the way over to 10 tend to
work best for this highly cartoony kind
of stuff, you can see on the beard you
can see what's going on with the hair
I'll make sure the lighting is turned on
that's going to give me a little bit more.
Play with this on your own computer
to see exactly what you're getting?
I'm going to hit preview,
that's going to take a few seconds
but that's going to cartoon up
Gavin's face here, boom!
There it is and that looks pretty cool.
I'm going to accept that.
Now if I was just
doing this without recording it
I'd probably take a little bit longer
to really dial that in
and make sure it was perfect
but I like what we're seeing so
far that's really cool,
but what we need
to do is we need to really make
this a lot more contrasty
because it's supposed to be a cartoon,
so we need to have those dark lines
dark and the bright lines bright
and so what we're going to do is
we are going to copy this
filter Smart Object
command J and then
what I'm going to do is
I'm going to go
to my layer
and then I'm going to go
down to Smart Objects
and rasterize I'm
going to rasterize what we've done
and then I'm going to rename this to
High Pass Filter
you can't apply a High Pass Filterin
the way that I want and a Smart Object
and you'll see why so I'm going to go
here to Filter, Other,
High Pass Filter
and normally you would just do a little
touch of this just a little tiny touch
of it something down to one pixel or
something if you're going to use this as
a sharpening technique we're using it
for a cartoony technique, so we're going
to take it way up here,
so I can start to
see all the details in Gavin's face
all of the lines and then I'm going to hit
OK this makes this look grey until we go
over to our layers panel and we change
this blending mode to overlay
and once we do that Bamo!
Look at what that does
to our image? So this is again full
screen this is before and this is after
see how that really sharpens that up?
It's really really cool and so once
that's done, we can take a look at what
we've done, I think we have a nice
cartoon. I'm going to save that
and we'll take a look at this full screen.
Let me show you a different image
that I processed using this exact same
technique but just in a little bit
different way, so instead of using all
the distortion and making something
that looks like a caricature
or a cartoon I created something
that looks more
painterly and beautiful.
So let me show
you the layers that I've done here
and we're not going to do this
in real time.
I'm just going to show you
exactly what I did,
because it's using the exact same
method that I had before,
so what I did
was I started with my picture
of Nadia here,
plain background.
I created a copy
of the background layer
called it Nadia,
then I went into Analog Effects Pro
to add this texture.
Then one thing I made sure that I did
is to make sure
that none of that texture
it falls on Nadia's face
and so I did that using
control points in Analog Effects Pro 2
to make sure to remove that
from her face.
Then I added another effects layer
which is to clarify
all this to really give it some contrast
and over sharpen
it so then when I went in,
I could do that oil paint filter,
now notice this
oil paint filter sort of blows
out her eyes and her lips
and it's just way too
much on her face but her hair looks
really cool, it's a little bit too much
on her arms as well
and so what I did
was I made a copy of this clarity
or clarified layer here,
I just made a new
copy of that and then ran that
oil paint filter again
and then added a layer mask
so I'll show you here's the first
oil paint layer,
here's the second layer
and using the layer mask
I just painted that
onto her eyes and lips
so that you can
see that it's not quite as crazy
so here it is off,
here it is turned on,
so you can do different types
different strengths of these filters
and then using layer masks
you can paint this on
and off so I'll shut everything off here
so you can see exactly what that layer
is, it's just pretty much her face so
once I had that,
then I went in and I merged those two layers,
so we'll have this merged layer
right here and then I use my High Pass Filter
to really make that punchy.
Then I think that I really
wanted to have something that
wasn't so bold with the color
and so I added a Gradient Map.
The Gradient Maps
are found right here at the bottom,
they're another filter
just go in here and add that.
The nice thing about a Gradient Map
I'll take this and put it up to a 100%
you can see what that is.
It's almost like a split tone.
It's really cool but you don't have to have
the opacity at a 100%, you can
take that down to something like I did
which is 20% and so it just
sort of flavors the color
so you can
play with that as you're editing your
images, these Gradient Maps
are really, really awesome.
Then the last thing I did
is I thought that I really wanted to
bring her eyes back into this
so again I went down and copied
my original image.
The original copy of the background
of Nadia and then I put that on top
and added a layer mask
and I'll turn everything else off
so you can sort of see what I did,
then I just sort of
painted not at a 100% opacity
I used sort of a semi opaque brush
something at about 50%, then
painted over her arms and her eyes
and her nose
and so you can see that
just brings back that natural look
so if I turn that layer off
you can see it's
cartoony turn that back on,
you can see that her face
looks a little bit more realistic
so when we zoom out to a 100%
you can see that this is
something that really looks amazing.
Hey well that was tons of fun.
Thank you so much for joining me
for this episode.
Make sure you check me out
on Instagram to see all the kind
of crazy wacky things
that I created using this technique,
also make sure you subscribe
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thanks again for joining me
I'll see you again next time.