Photoshop Tips Tricks and Tutorials (Photoshoplogger): How to make cartooned background leaving the people look real

This tutorial will show you how to get realistic people within a cartooned or say sketched photo. This tutorial requires no major specialization in Photoshop tools. A beginner too can try for this tutorials and this is really a very easy but nice effect to apply in any photo. All that is needed is Adobe Photoshop Application of any version. Hope this tutorial will help you.

Well, we will start picking up a picture that will finally take the following look:

Final Result of the tutorial - getting realistic people with cartooned background

In above picture, we can see that the environment is cartooned but the people sitting there look realistic. So now we will learn how to do this. Here are the steps;

Step 1:

Firstly, run Adobe Photoshop application ( Shortcut: Press Windows(key) + R and then type ‘Photoshop’ and press enter).

Now we need to import picture from our computer. If you want the image I am using in this tutorial you can simply Right click on the image and click on ‘save picture as’ and save it in your computer. Otherwise you can use your own.

Go to file menu –> click on open –> (an open dialogue box will appear) –> select the image and then click on OK.

Step 2:

When you finish importing the image, the image will appear as a layer named background which is locked by default.

Step 3:

Now we need to create a duplicate layer of the background layer. For this, (make sure your background layer is selected and Move tool ( V ) is active) press Ctrl + J. Or just right click on the background layer and the click on ‘Duplicate layer’

A duplicate layer will appear above background layer with the name ‘layer 1’ in the layers palette.

Step 4:

If you see the result as above, you are going great. Now we are applying filter property in the new layer.

Before that, set foreground color to black and background color to white.

Now, we are applying filter to layer 1, so make sure it is selected.

Then, go to Filter menu –> click on Artistic –> click on Poster Edges

you will get a window like below;

Click on OK. You will see the result as below.

Step 5:

Now apply vector mask to the new layer. It is very important step you are going through. All our effect that we are making depends on vector mask.

For this, Keep layer 1 selected and then click on Add vector mask icon in the bottom bar of the layers palette.

Step 6;

We are almost to completion of this tutorial. We will need to do now is to just use brush tool to the area that we want to look real.

Select brush tool (or simply press B) and then use brush set picker to define brush size and hardness and type of brush. For now use 46 px brush diameter and 0 level of hardness. Choose the type of the brush as I have used. Notice that, the brush set picker tool appear only when brush tool is active.