I am so amazed at the many creative works that everyone has done at this site. I recently viewed a picture at the following link:

http://www.retouchpro.com/gallery/data/500/149p1010002blureffect.jpg

It looks absolutely gorgeous! I have been reading in this forum to learn the different techniques of editing pictures with Photoshop (since I only have the very, very basic knowledge of the program). I followed the instructions and was able to complete the task like that of the original creator. (Thank you to those you have been great enough to jot down the procedures.). I have been trying to find out ways of re-creating this photo, but am unable to so far. If anyone has any idea, please let me know. I would love to have someone help guide me through it so that I may know how it is done.

Also, I was wondering if you could let me know how I can turn a normal picture of someone into a cartoon/anime image like the one I am attaching. Thanks so much for all your help!!!

AT.

On the anime, what I tried was:

Use a Curves adjustment layer to change the skintones. I suggest adjusting Red, Green and Blue independently and experimenting -- the settings I used for this image are attached.

Roughly select the eyes and eyebrows, feather selection and copy (Ctrl-J) to another layer. Do a Free Transform (Ctrl-T) on this layer -- making the eyes significantly taller (around 125%?) and a bit wider (105%?). You may want to move them down slightly too. In this case I also moved the eyebrows up a bit as they were quite close to the eyes.

Roughly select the mouth, feather selection and copy (Ctrl-J) to another layer. Do a Free Transform (Ctrl-T) on this layer -- making the mouth narrower (around 80-90%?).

In this case as the eyes were quite pale I also darkened the irises.

Did a Smart Blur on the image.

Painted in some additional eyelashes on the top lid and cloned out most of the eyelashes on the bottom lid.

Added background layer and masked out the background.

WOW Leah we have a whole new person, errrr, anime. All that work for a demo. You impress me. Good job. You gave me some great ideas for a huge project I'm working on. Thanks.

Janet

Leah,

Thanks so much for responding to my message along with the valuable instructions. I will give it a try after I get home from work :o:

Thanks again!!

On the other one, I suspect that the technique is something like duplicating the layer and applying Gaussian Blur to everything except the area you want to remain sharp, then possibly changing the blend mode to Screen (hard to say without seeing the original).

I couldn't find a really suitable image to try this on, but here's a try using a less-suitable one (original from freefoto.com). In this case I also used the eScrappers StarFilter tutorial (http://www.escrappers.com/starfilter.html) as it seemed to fit well.

I have remembered on the anime-style photo that I masked off the curves adjustment so that it didn't apply to the hair (since that made the hair too pale and it didn't contrast with the face). Also I added a little more color to the lips at one point.