In this article, I will show you step by step how to easily turn your photo into a pop art effect. Some tools and filters of the popular Photoshop software will be used. So, art lovers, your mice!
Indeed, how to talk about graphic trends without mentioning the famous pop art? Unveiling one of the many ways to make graphic design pop art is a way to pay homage to this timeless style. Today, Orangetitles brings few tips for you. Here are the details of the different steps:
Prepare your photo
First and foremost, you must choose your photo so that the pop art effect is as beautiful as possible. The face must be fairly clean and evenly lit. Shadows on the eyes are to be avoided, for example. Accessories such as glasses, tie, hat are welcome because they will allow you to add a touch of color to your portrait.
Once your image is found, open it in Photoshop and with the crop tool (c) select the face and bust square: to do this, draw your selection while keeping the shift button pressed. Make “entry” to validate the crop and resize the photo to the desired size. You can then save your file as .psd format. (File> Save As)
Detour the character
We will start by removing the background, which will accentuate the pop art effect leaving a lot of room for color. Use the feather tool (p) or the polygonal lasso, which is easier to handle. Be sure to follow the contours of the character.
When you have finished your drawing, double-click on the background layer to unlock it, then in the drawn palette, make a right click on your path and choose “define a selection”. Swap the selection (ctrl + shift + i) and press the “supp” button to make the background disappear.
Set the filters to get the pop art effect
You will now apply a slight blur to your photo, to finally get a more drawn effect. Go to the menu Filters> Attenuation> Gaussian Blur: here, you can put a radius of 5 pixels, but it depends on the sharpness of your photo and its size. Try different settings; the whole thing is that the blur effect is not too strong.
Then in the Picture> Adjust> Threshold menu, adjust the slider so that as many black lines as possible appear, without too much shadows. To help you, you can take inspiration from our example below. The important thing is to recognize the person by keeping the pop art effect.
Color the different areas
Now color your image. To do this, create a new layer and position it in the background. Then using the paint bucket tool (opacity 100%, tolerance 0 and no smoothing), choose a flashy color and apply it on our new layer. Do the same on the top layer that contains our character: set another color and click with the paint bucket on the black, the same for the white.
Here, the character contains accessories, so we will color them too. To do this, you must first select them using the pen tool or the polygonal lasso. Once the selection is made, adjust your color and click in the white to color the accessory.
And now, your first pop art effect box is over!
Finally, multiply the boxes and voila!
Open a new file whose width and height will be twice your first square. Add horizontal and vertical marks in the middle, (View> New Marker) to delimit the four boxes of our table.
Return to your pop art a box, select all layers in the layer palette by holding down the shift button, then merge them (Ctrl + E). Then drag this first box at the top right of your new file. Make ctrl + j three times to duplicate this layer. Position the other three squares on the board. You can now apply different colors to each box. To do this, just click with the paint bucket on the different color areas you want to edit. And to leave nothing to chance, I propose to make your own graphic design pop art canvas!
