Don’t believe me? Try it. Just pull an image off a website and try printing it at 4 x 6. Tell me if you don’t get a pixelated piece of crap.
But, to continue, I got a job from my production class to produce an invitation card for a house warming party. The client wanted to use an image of their home for the cover of the card, and of course, the image was at screen resolution (96 dpi at 4 x 6 in).
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So what do you do? In the idealist of circumstances, I’d be able to talk to the client and explain to them why the picture was a bad choice and ask for a higher-res image. But since I was only given roughly an hour and a half to get it done, I’d have to try and make do. And that meant trying to up the resolution using Photoshop filters.
There are a lot of different styles/effects you can achieve from layering different Photoshop filters. And you can use these effects to get a somewhat nice looking stylized image (like a sketch, watercolor, or even psychedelic vibe). For this job, I decided to go for a drawn/colored pencil style.
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I first resized the picture to the size of the card cover (8.5 x 5.5in) and duplicated the image layer multiple times. I would use a different filter on each layer, and then blend the layers using the blending modes. I forgot to label what blending modes I used, but I think it was a combination of watercolor, graphic pen, and a blended pointalized fill layer (filled with black). A thing to keep in mind is exposure/brightness. Especially if you’re using a lot of the multiply or “overlay” blend modes, because they’ll make the image dark really fast, so don’t forget about your adjustment layers like curves/levels/brightness, to adjust accordingly.
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The end result is by no means perfect, but at least the pixelation is well hidden in the guise of a stylized drawing.
Thanks for reading, and remember to comment below!
Looks good. Now i"ll try throwing filters on all the images i steal of the web. Hopefully it"ll help me out.
ReplyDeleteA Theory of Madness does not condone the theft or misuse of any intellectual property found online or anywhere else.... but yeah Ivan, it can work pretty well ;-)
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