Before and After
In this piece I was wanting to create something that had an almost comic book/animated look while still maintaining a photo quality about it. To create the finished effect for the image below I used a number of settings and techniques. The original image was the plain black and white portrait. I began by selecting the white area around the outside of the subject using the color range. After getting the majority of the area selected using that method I cleaned up the smaller parts using the quick selection tool. I created a mask and then painted a new layer blue and placed it beneath the original layer to become the background. The image was lacking the contrast I wanted so I added a contrast adjustment to make the image pop. From here I created multiple layers for the hair, eyes, skin and eye mask and used the magnetic lasso selection, quick selection and the marquee selection tools to select the respective areas. I used the paint brush to color the areas while changing the brushes size and softness to get the desired results. I changed the layer mode to color and adjusted the opacity. To finish it off I used the marquee selection to add a white border and added a drop shadow to it to create a sense of depth in the image.