Posterizing, Posterization thoughts and ideas

[Doug Nelson]

I've been fiddling with a few ideas of my own, and it seems to me that many from-scratch art techniques would need to start with some sort of posterization.

I'm wondering if there isn't some technique where you can not only posterize an image, but each posterization level would be put on its own layer. This would be a good starting point for many possible art techniques.

[jeaniesa]

Re: Posterizing

it seems to me that many from-scratch art techniques would need to start with some sort of posterization.

By "from-scratch" - do you mean in the tradtional sense or starting form a photo?

I'm wondering if there isn't some technique where you can not only posterize an image, but each posterization level would be put on its own layer. This would be a good starting point for many possible art techniques.

What do you mean by "each posterization level"? (Not knowing THAT much about posterization, I'm already lost. )

I think I agree that it's a good starting point for art techniques. In fact, the palette knife creates posterization to some effect - esp. if you use a large brush size and little detail - which is why I find myself starting with that filter quite often.

Jeanie

[Doug Nelson]

Posterization is taking a continuous tone image and breaking it down into X tones (you specify X).

It seems that if you had your image simplified to X tones, you could then alter those tones to fit the color pallette you had in mind, and if each of those tones were on separate layers they could be treated, in effect, as paints, and had various things done with them to seem brushlike.

As an experiment take a photo and posterize it to 3 or 4 tones (it will look really bad this simple, but this is an experiment). Now select each tone using magic wand on non-contiguous and paste it to a new layer. Turn off your original image. Things should look roughly as they did before you did the selections (although even at this point some creative effects are possible). Now fiddle with the hue/sat of each layer and try some filters (I was playing with 'crystalize' and 'motion blur', but many others would be interesting).

I was thinking you could control the amount of overlap, leaving white spaces between some sections and having others on top of each other. Many other controls are available once you've deconstructed a photo to this point.

I'm sure many paint filters do very sophisticated versions of this, along with a lot of other things, but would not offer this level of control and personalization.

[jeaniesa]

Good - I THOUGHT that's what you were saying, but wasn't sure. I do think having each color on a separate layer would allow for a LOT of control over the final image - even deciding if you want some colors to overlap others. Very interesting thought, but my experiments will have to wait until my next allotted "play time."

Jeanie

[Ed_L]

I think you've got something there Doug. I haven't really tried much in the way of "art", but like you, I think posterization would make things much simpler.

Ed

[G. Couch]

You could vectorize the image using a program like Corel Trace. Then just select the shapes of the same color, group them together and export back out as a bitmap. Repeat for each color and then pull the seperate files into photoshop as it's own layer.

Of course, this would take a great deal of time and probably would not achieve a very good result...but it works in theory!

[Doug Nelson]

Greg:

That was actually the thinking that led me to the experiment that in turn led to this post. I thought that if individual poster tones could be vectorized, then all sorts of possibilities would surface. But then I actually tried it, and I crashed and burned real fast

My problem is the tracing routines disregard the subject, which the artist cannot. I had visions of millions of tiny vectored brushstrokes, each of which could be rotated, skewed, etc., to emulate individual brush strokes. But all I ended up with was mush.

[DannyRaphael]

Not so automatic action

This concept piqued my interest so I took a stab at buiding an .ATN.

In a nutshell the grayscale tone or color of interest is selected using the Eyedropper tool... then the action invokes the SELECT/COLOR RANGE function to create a selection, which is used against the base posterized layer to create a new layer.

It's a "select 1 color/tone at-a-time" process, but once you get on a roll it goes pretty fast. The number of individual layers needed to recreate an original color posterized layer is a function of how liberal one is with the Select/Color Fuzziness slider. Fewer iterations were needed for grayscale images.

Seems to work OK on color or grayscale images. To me grayscale seemed to generate better results because there are fewer tone variations. (I started with a posterization of 5 levels. Your mileage will vary.)

It's non-destructive and operates against the active (posterized) layer.

Here's the action if anyone wants to try it.

The unmowed lawn will wait another day. Thanks for the inspiration (again), Doug...

~DannyR~

[jeaniesa]

Danny - Just in case you're wondering, I downloaded your action last night, I just haven't had a chance to actually DO anything with it yet! I'm anxious to try it though...
Jeanie

[Doug Nelson]

I guess I'll save my idea about using posterization as a start for sculpture for another day (got to let Danny get his lawn done )

[Guest]

Re: Posterization

Doug did a post about creating something on the posterzation idea. This I did with a layer for each color band, tried different effects on these layers, and now, don't remember what...........

I did some colorize, some effects wind, and some gaus blur. Some lighting effect(all done in PSP7) a frame I made, changed it after installation with lights. The tree was treated separately as the focal point of the piece.
It's from a photo of a carribean isle.
greg

[MiningArt]

Re: Posterizing, Posterization thoughts and ideas

converted to 16 color gif
vectorized to .ps
edited vector file, a few gradients and an overlay for some texture.
converted to .jpg

The editing of the vector file gave a lot of control in selecting elements, but on my system the thousands of vector paths really bogged things down.

I also tried the 16 color raster file. Selected color groups and saved them. This works fairly well. With a way to automate the simplification, selection and saving each as a layer, mask or even as a file it would be interesting to see the results. Especially if there was control on the selection and output. Because it is hard to program artistic observation maybe you could give the original exaggerated focal points and coloring by hand before the process was started.