Hello and welcome to yet another tutorial by Davies Media Design,
my name is Michael Davies, and in today's tutorial I'll be showing you
how to create a cartoon effect using any photo in GIMP. I'll be using GIMP version
2.10.20 which is the latest version of GIMP at the time of this tutorial.
But of course before I get into that I want to direct you guys over to DaviesMediaDesign.com.
As always I have tons of video tutorials on here, my GIMP Book of Layers, and open source
help articles so definitely check that out. You can enroll in my GIMP 2.10 Masterclass:
From Beginner to Pro Photo Editing on Udemy. You can enroll in any of my Skillshare classes
by visiting GIMPSchool.com. And you can get more with a Premium Membership to Davies Media Design.
I'll include all the relevant links from this tutorial in the description of the video. Here
is the free photo I'll be using for today's tutorial - just click "free download" and go
with the large download. But here is the final composition. This is the final cartoon effect.
So if I come over here, shift-click - there's a before, shift-click - there's the after. Let's
dive into this. So I'm going to start by going to File>Open Recent, and I'm just going to select
this photo. It'll ask me if I want to convert this to GIMP's native sRGB color space. I'll
click convert. So the next step here is I want to erase the background of this photo. Since this is
a portrait photo in my case it's pretty easy to use the Foreground Select Tool, and then clean up
the selection that that's going to create around your subject using the lasso tool. If you're not
sure what I'm talking about, I do have an entire tutorial dedicated to the Foreground Select Tool,
so check that out. That's the method I use to originally erase this background. So I'm not
going to go through that again since I already did this ahead of time. So what I'll do is I'll
come back to my original composition, and once I finished selecting the foreground object with
my Foreground Select Tool I saved that selection here as a path. If you're not sure how to do that
I have a tutorial on how to save your selections in GIMP. So in my case I'm going to right click
and copy this path, come over here and, still in my paths tab, I'll right click>paste path. And if
I unhide this you'll see there is my outline. So again you guys can create the same outline using
the Foreground Select Tool, or if you prefer you can simply use the path tool here. But you
will need to save your selection as a path after you've selected your foreground subject. So make
sure you do that. So I'll come over here in my paths tab and convert this path to a selection,
and I can hide this path and now come back to my layers panel, ctrl+c to copy this,
ctrl+alt+v - that's going to paste that in place. Or I can go to Edit>Paste in place. We're gonna
add this floating selection to a new layer. And now we have our model or the foreground subject
on its own layer. So now we're gonna start adding some of our effects, and I'll start by reducing
the colors in the original image. And I'll do this using the Posterization filter. So go to
Colors>Posterize. And this obviously doesn't look great. So what I want to do is increase the number
of Posterized Levels until I get the shading that I like and the amount of colors I like. So I think
there at 10, for me, is gonna look pretty good. You guys might have a different number depending
on how you want this to look, but I think 10 looks pretty good. I can try 11 - I think that's
a bit too much, so I'm gonna go back one more. So you want to have some of the highlights in here,
you want to have good transitioning of the colors, but you also want this to be pretty reduced in
terms of the amount of overall colors left. So I'll click OK. Now if I hold ctrl+zoom in,
you'll see that the posterization has created this pixelated look between the transitioning
colors. So we need to smooth that out and we'll do that using a filter. So I am going to be using the
G'MIC filter - the G'MIC plug-in. And this is a free plugin that I use in a lot of my tutorials.
I recommend downloading it if you haven't already. Once you've downloaded and installed that G'MIC
plug-in, go to Filters>G'MIC, it says "G'MIC-QT" or "G'MIC Cute" as some people say. So now I'll
come up to the search bar and type in "smooth," and I want to use this filter here - the "Dream
Smoothing," and you guys can simply copy all the settings I have here for mine and maybe
tweak this if you want and just figure out the settings that you like the most. But this is the
setting I liked for this, and you can see that that has done a good job of smoothing out the
transitions here. So come over here and click OK. So there is our photo with that dream smoothing,
and it's already starting to look like a cartoon. We need to of course get rid of this background
stuff here - we don't want that. So what I'll do is I'll come back over here to my paths,
and I'm just going to turn this path back into a selection. Come over here to my layers panel,
right-click and go to "Add layer mask." Make sure this is set to "Selection" and click "Add."
And that has masked out that background. So hit ctrl+shift+a to deselect that. Next what I want
to do is add an outline to this so it looks like an almost, like, a pencil drawing or something. So
I'll come over here create a new layer and I'll just name this "stroke," fill it with
transparency and click OK. We'll come back to the Paths tab and with this path selected here we'll
come down here and click on this option, which is going to stroke that path. And you want to
make sure that your foreground color here is set to black or whatever color you want the cartoon
outline to be. And then I'll come over here and make sure I select the "stroke" line option. I
set my line width to 10 and my line style I went with the straight up line right there,
and then click stroke. So we're moving right along here - the next step is I want to color and adjust
this photo. So right now the colors are a bit off. And I'll do that by coming back over here
to the layers panel and we'll come over here to our pasted layer, let's double click on this and
rename it "Color correction," press the enter key. So make sure we're on the layer itself and
not the layer mask, and I'll start by going to Colors>Levels. So now we can adjust the levels
here. So I basically want to lighten this up - you guys might have different settings than me.
And we'll come over here to the "Color Channels" and color correct this.
So we're either adding cyan or adding red.
So come over to the green channel and we're either adding magenta or green.
And finally we'll go to the blue channel so we're either adding blue or yellow.
That looks pretty good, so I'll click OK. I'm gonna perform some further color correcting by
going to Colors>Hue/Saturation, and here we can go to specific color channels. So in this case I'll
go to the yellow color channel, and we can turn this down a bit - the saturation - so that'll
turn down the intensity of the yellows. I can also adjust the lightness here. So I'm gonna
make this slightly lighter, and if I want I can shift the hue which probably isn't
totally necessary here. Maybe shift it a tiny bit. Let's move on to the red channel because
I think there's a bit too much red in here. So we can tone down the red using the saturation
slider and also adjust the lightness of it. Let's make it a little lighter. You guys can
continue making adjustments to the other color channels here, but I'm happy with this. I'll
click OK. So there's just a couple of steps here to adjust the colors as well as enhance
the edges of this to make it look more cartoony. So I'm going to start with enhancing the edges,
and you'll see what I mean in a second. So I'll go to Colors>Curves. So right
now I'm just going to add some general contrast to this by creating an s-curve,
and let me just come over here and adjust the blue channel because there is a lot of yellow in
here right now. So we'll just add some blue back to the highlights. I do have an entire tutorial
dedicated to using the Curves tool, so definitely check that out. That looks alright so I'll click
OK. Next I'm going to adjust the color temperature of this. So I'll go to Colors>Color Temperature,
and in this case I'm going to turn the intended temperature up. I know we've been getting rid
of a lot of the yellows but I think this is okay to turn up because it just makes this look warmer
overall as opposed to just making it look really yellow. So click OK. Lastly I'll add a high-pass
sharpening to this. So I'll come over here, duplicate our original layer, we'll double click
on this to name it high-pass. This is going to sharpen our photo but also enhance the edges even
further. So I'll go to Filters>Enhance>High-Pass. And you can see here the High-Pass tool is going
to add contrast to the edges here - just the edges. I'm just going to go with 4 and 1 as
my settings here and click OK. And we'll change the layer mode of this to "Soft Light." So there
you can see the result of that. Shift-click - here's where we're at so far, so this is a
before. Shift-click again - there is the after. Alright, so now I'm going to add one more effect
to this and then we're going to add the cartoony background. So the final effect I'll add to this
is basically going to be a sketch effect. It'll make it look like somebody sketched this out with
a pencil or something. So I'll come back over here to our color correction layer, duplicate that;
so on the duplicate layer I'll go to Filters, and we'll go back to G'MIC and up here in the
search bar I'll type "Sketch." And we'll go with the sketch option here, and I believe I just went
with the default values here, but you guys can copy my values if they look different from yours.
It's not gonna look great at first. Obviously this is way too much sketching going on here.
So we want to tone this down but it's going to be good for now. So I'll come over here and click OK.
So now you can see we have a sketch effect. Next I'll come over to the layer mode,
and this time I'm going to go with "Multiply." So click on that option. And I'll turn down the
opacity - I don't want this to be totally opaque here I want there to be some transparency. But
if I hold ctrl and zoom in, you can see now there's little sketch marks in here,
especially in the shading. So it just makes this look like more of a pencil drawing - like a pencil
cartoon. Alright so now we're gonna add the background of this. So let's come over here
and hide our original layer, and now I'm just going to click on the bottom layer and click to
create a new layer. We'll name this "Background," keep it filled with transparency, and click OK.
So now I'll hit the "G" key on my keyboard to grab my gradient tool. We'll come over here,
change our gradient to "Foreground to background RGB," the shape is set to "Radial," and I'll come
over here to my foreground color. I went with this orange color - you guys can copy my HTML notation
here. I'll click OK. And for my background color I went with this yellow color - you guys can copy
that. I'll click OK. And we'll click and drag this from near the middle to the outside. And
you can always swap the colors around like so and adjust the midpoint of this if you want. And I'll
hit the enter key. Next we're going to give this that sort of comic-book background. So to do that
I'll go to Filters>Distorts>Newsprint. And I'll start by coming up top here,
and we'll change this to RGB for the channels. So now we have a red, green,
and blue channel. And I'm going to change each of these to say "circle," and I'm going to keep the
values here as the default. You guys can copy mine if yours are different, but they should be the
same. I'll change all of these to circle. So now you can see what that's doing to our background,
and we don't need to mess with any of the other settings here so I'll click OK. So lastly I'm
going to adjust the saturation of the colors in here. So I'll come back to the color correction
layer - the original one - and we'll go to Colors>Saturation. So I just turn the saturation
down a bit on here - not too much, like so - and I'll click OK. And there's our final composition.
Alright so that's it for this tutorial, hopefully you liked it. If you did, you could check out my
YouTube channel at youtube.com/DaviesMediaDesign. Don't forget to subscribe and click the bell icon
to be notified each time I have a brand new tutorial. You can check out any of the links to
my resources in the description of the video, but thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.