Hi, I'm much more of a photographer than I am an illustrator, or someone who gets really creative in photoshop. I have an image that would really benefit from the poster edges function in ps, but I hate the black splotches/spots that it creates inside the facial area of my subjects. I worked the three controls to no avail in terms of getting rid of it. Do you guys know of how to clear it up? Or is there another way of creating an illustration look to an image that is much cleaner than this?
There is a whole 'nother world out there dealing with photo art. Very few of the artists (other than the smudgers) hang out here in the Miranda forums. The best place is here:
Like you, I'm not into it much but dabble from time to time. One thing I discovered is that you need to "prep" your image before feeding it to functions like poster edges by removing as much detail as possible. Start with a heavy dose of noise reduction. A plugin like Noiseware cranked to the max for example. Then maybe follow that with a dose of surface blur.
Also, play around with lowering contrast. The cleaner and flatter you image is, the less blotches you get. Then you can restore contrast and saturation after the fact.
I fell prey to the Topaz Simplify plugin during their xmas sale. For the $20 sale price it's an interesting tool for artwork. But then I stumbled upon a freeware here: http://www.redfieldplugins.com/filterFineTouch.htm that does some interesting things. I found it more attractive than Topaz Simplify.
Nice! Thanks for the info on the other forum, and the suggestions. I'll definitely try out those prep suggestions as I hadn't done that before. I'll also check out that plugin and the Topaz plugin as well.
Yeah, I know, that's probably pretty easy. The "masking out" part is the bit that throws me. I've managed to learn a lot of things on ps ("a lot", as in compared to someone who knows nothing about ps), but masking is one thing that's eluded me.
