How to Edit Pictures for a Comic Book Effect

A photograph with a comic-book effect added.

In the early days of comic books, only a small range of colors were used in printing. To achieve shades and hues outside of a few basic colors of ink, printers and artists relied on halftone--tiny dots alongside one another that took on the appearance of various colors. Although comic printing processes are far more sophisticated today, images in halftone still have the effect of looking as though they've been scanned right out of a comic book.

Things You'll Need

• Image
• Adobe Photoshop

Instructions

1. Locate a picture to which you wish to add a comic-book effect. Any photograph will work, though drawings and paintings will usually look more "comic book-like" than photographs. Open this picture in Photoshop.

2. Using the selection tool, copy the entire image, and paste a second version of it over the first. Photoshop should automatically create a second layer for the new image. The two should be perfectly lined up. If you change the opacity on the new image, you should not notice any difference to the image. If they aren't lined up, you will see a "ghost" of the new image next to the original when lowering the opacity.

3. Select the second layer--the layer on which the second version of the image sits. Under the "filters" menu, select "pixelate" and then "color halftone."

4. Set the radius to four, and then set each of the four screen angles to 25 degrees. You can experiment with these values to achieve different effects. These values are simply a suggestion, and the values used in the example above.

5. Lower the opacity of the halftone layer to about 50 percent (more or less to taste). This will create the illusion that the image has been rendered in halftone.

Tips & Warnings

• By adjusting the brightness, contrast and saturation, you can also make the original image look more like a painting. Do this before doing any copying or pasting, as the second version of the image needs to match the first exactly.

• You can also select "halftone" under the sketch menu in the filters. This will create a black-and-white version. By inverting the image (usually "Ctrl I" or "Apple I") and lowering the opacity, you can create a similar effect, but the colors will not be as bold as they would be from a color halftone.