Turning pictures into drawings / paintings?

SwordLord

I picked up a couple of pictures of the late, great, David Bowie in the movie Labyrinth. He looks marvelous as a wizard. I also picked up a few other pictures I'd like to use as custom portraits.

Does anyone have a tool they use to turn pictures into images that "match" with Baldurs Gate images? Sometimes people use web/phone apps to turn images into cartoons so I thought someone may be using something like that.

ineth

If such a tool exists, I'd like to know about it too... But I doubt it.

I know that there are artists on deviantart who start with a photo of a person and then spend hours brushing over it by hand using digital painting software in order to make it look like a painted video game portrait.

Why would they go to that effort if the same effect could be achieved with the press of a button?

BillyYank

There's a couple of websites that say they can turn a photo into a painting, but they just apply a filter of some sort and they don't look very good.

There's a bunch of tutorials out there for using Photoshop to make a photo look painterly, but I've never tried them so I don't know how well they work. I'd say they're your best bet though.

lunar

Gimp can be used for this purpose, just apply a little blur, play with color balance and contrast and use different amounts of sharpen repeatedly until it looks baldurised. I have my custom portraits created by the program and they are not bad.
Ofcourse there are professional bg portrait makers here, they are very very good at it. Just check old custom portrait threads.

ineth

@SwordLord

I just discovered that I get decent results using the "Oil Paint" filter in Photoshop CS6.

For example, here's a cool photograph of a person:



I opened it in Photoshop, chose "Filter > Oil Paint", and selected these settings:

• The "Stylization" slider set to somewhere between the 25% and 75% mark
• The "Cleanliness" slider set very close to zero
• All other sliders set to zero (i.e. completely to the left)

After clicking OK, it looked like this:



As you can see, the filter worked absolute wonders for the hair.
However, what it did to the skin doesn't look very fitting for a BG portrait.
Also, it took too much sharpness out of the eyes.

So, I post-processed it by briefly going over the skin with the Blur and Smudge tools, and copying the pupils of the eyes back in from the original photo.

The result:



Not bad for a process that takes around 2 minutes in total, eh?

An artist doing a proper paint-over (or painting from scratch) could get better results of course, but that takes much more skill and time... :P

smeagolheart

@ineth

I tried your 2 minute portrait technique... hehe, cool.

Illustair

Has anyone ever made a you-know-who BG portrait for this?

Go for the eyes, Rocket, go for the eyes!!

Dee

@Illustair Not gonna lie, my first thought here was "Stay good, Riff! Don't be evil!"