I gotta ask, I’m making a skin, and I’m pretty much done with everything for the exception of the picture.

4 thoughts on “I gotta ask, I’m making a skin, and I’m pretty much done with everything for the exception of the picture.”

1. You can take stock art and use a photo-editing filters to reduce it down to two colors (black and white), playing with the contrast and so on to control the level of detail.. that’s what I did.  When John Harper does them, I think he does a sort of vector art tracing of a photograph.

2. Damn it’s a lot harder than it looks. I may have to stick with what I have, but if any of you can help I’d be really glad.

3. Yeah, I tried it out just to taste my own medicine and yeah, it’s harder than it looks. Make sure you start with a nice high-contrast image – a typical vacation outdoor shot is probably terrible. You want something with nice light and dark areas on the subject.

   My layer order is:

   adjustment layer: posterize (2 colors)

   adjustment layer: black and white

   adjustment layer: brightness & contrast

   white mask that blots out the background

   original photo

   So my second tip is that it seems to help to have multiple brightness-adjustment layers, each one masked to a different part of the subject.  For example, I have one that adjusts the skin, another for the clothing, another for the hair.

   Then you can play around with the brightness level on the adjustment layers, which moves the black/white division around.

   Finally, I think you need to redraw the image on another layer, to clean up all the ‘gravel’ and to simplify the odder shapes. 😛

4. Thanks for the advice, I’ve completed the skin in it’s entirety. I feel like I should play test it before posting it up here though.

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