Pop Art Portraits Made Easy!

Utilise Photoshop Elements’ powerful built-in photo filters to create unusual portraits in a matter of minutes!

Photoshop and Photoshop Elements boast a number of built-in creative filters that you can use to transform the look of any ordinary photo with very little effort. In this quick tutorial, we’ll show you how to do exactly that. By using various filters you can transform a traditional portrait into a striking, brightly coloured pop art-style picture.

Go from something like this….

to this….

Read on to see how you can transform your portraits into a work of art….

We’ll begin by selecting the image’s subject and then inverting the selection to change the background colour. We’ll then show you how to use two separate filters to add colour and greater detail to our portrait, before using layers and Blending Modes to dramatically alter the original portrait’s look. We’ll finish off by showing you how to create an Andy Warhol-style multi-image portrait using Elements’ Hue/Saturation command. This is a great way to make a variety of different coloured portraits from the same photo – something that would have taken Warhol days to create using stencils, monochrome photos and coloured paints. If you’re really keen to give your images maximum impact, you could then print your multi-portrait image onto an A3-sized canvas.

STEP BY STEP – Get creative with your portraits

1. Cut out your subject

Open your portrait image and go to Layer>DuplicateLayer. Call the layer Cutout Filter. Use the Quick Selection tool (with a 400px brush) to draw over and select the girl, right-click on the selection, select Feather and set Radius to 4. Go to Filter>Artistic>Cutout, set Number of Levels to 6, Edge Simplicity to 4 and Edge Fidelity to 1. Click OK.

2. Change the background colour

Inverse the selection by pressing Shift+Ctrl+I, then go to Enhance>Adjust Colour> Replace Colour. Click on the wall in the main image, then set Fuzziness to 200 and Hue to +161. Click OK. Press Ctrl+D, duplicate the Cutout Filter layer and call it Halftone Pattern. Hit the D key to set the Foreground and Background colours back to black and white.

3. Seeing spots

Go to Filter>Sketch>HalftonePattern. Set Size to 7, Contrast to 3, Pattern Type to Dot and click OK. Set the layer Blending Mode to Soft Light and Opacity to 60%. Double-click on the Background layer, hit OK, then drag it to the top of the stack. Set the Blending Mode to Soft Light and Opacity to 40%. Go to Layer> NewAdjustmentLayer>Hue/Saturation, hit OK and set Saturation to +20. Hit OK. Go to Layer>FlattenImage.

4. Go mad with colour

You can create different coloured versions of your finished pop art picture by using the Hue/Saturation tool (Enhance>AdjustColour>AdjustHue/Saturation) and dragging the Hue slider for different colour effects. Create four versions and put all the images together to create a Warhol-style picture (see Super Tip!)

SUPER TIP!

To create this popular Warhol-style grid

Open your first edited shot, go to SelectImage>Resize>ImageSize, set Pixel Dimensions to percent and enter a Width and Height of 50%. Repeat for the other three images. Create a new document the same size as your original photo and open your four edited images and then use the Move tool to drag your four edited photos onto the document.

 

Read more…

Make a fake bokeh effect for your portraits using Photoshop Elements

Make the ultimate bokeh portrait

 

This entry was posted on Friday, August 10th, 2012 at 12:03 pm and is filed under Photoshop Elements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a comment. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Tags: Photo Manipulation, photography, photoshop elements, pop art, portraits

hlatham | Photoshop Elements | 10/08/2012 12:03pm
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