Design stylized images with Photoshop and Illustrator

stylized female model's face

The image above has been stylised in Photoshop and Illustrator (I went for the American spelling of “stylized” in the heading for Google purposes).

To trace a photo in Adobe Illustrator, go File > Place and select the photo you want to trace. I find it useful to then lock this picture layer in the Layers palette and click on the New Layer icon to make sure your trace and your image remain separate in your Illustrator document. Then, as you can see below, I selected the Pen Tool (P) and traced the eyes, the nostrils and the lips. Tracing the picture gives you the added bonus of a good vector illustration to use elsewhere!

Now open up the original image in Photoshop. This is when you should perform the usual cloning and trickery to get rid of any blemishes, scratches or general untidiness in the photo. I used this technique to smooth the model’s skin. And I also brightened up the teeth, the whites of the eyes and the eyebrows.

Next you should bring in the elements of the Illustrator trace bit by bit. So, I selected the mouth first, copied it and pasted it onto the Photoshop image. The trace was done in black, so setting this layer of the pasted Illustrator lips to Overlay in the Photoshop Layers palette really makes the lips stand out and deepens the red.

Then the eyes were done in a similar way, first the irises, only this time I coloured them pale blue in Photoshop and set the Layer’s Blend Mode to Saturation. Then the highlight in the eyes was made white in Photoshop and their Layer’s Blend Mode was set to Overlay. Finally I pasted in the eyelashes.

The underlying image of the woman’s face is quite pale that is why employing this technique causes a really striking, almost “pop art” effect.

See below the original image on the left, the trace in the middle and, on the right, the finished piece.

stylized female model's face tutorial

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This article was posted on Monday, February 18th, 2008 at 11:20 am and is filed under Design, Illustrator, Photoshop.
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12 Responses to “Design stylized images with Photoshop and Illustrator”

  1. Steve O, on February 20th, 2008 at 9:36 pm, said:

    Never thought of using this sort of technique – looks interesting! I’ll have to give it a go.

  2. Rob Cubbon, on February 23rd, 2008 at 10:04 am, said:

    Yeah, I found it by accident – I had to get a vector illustration of a woman’s face. It works pretty well in this instance but I’m sure there’s a lot of other uses for it. Cheers.

  3. hamdi, on March 29th, 2008 at 8:55 am, said:

    Wow…. I wish I can do like you

  4. Rob Cubbon, on April 4th, 2008 at 11:34 pm, said:

    I’m sure you could, hamdi, actually you don’t need Illustrator for this one, it could all have been done in Photoshop.

  5. jayson, on April 29th, 2008 at 9:42 am, said:

    Nice! Thanks for the tips. I’ll some of them a shot on an upcoming project – nice job by the way.

  6. Rob Cubbon, on April 30th, 2008 at 11:19 am, said:

    Thank you, jayson. I’d be interested to see what you come up with. Hope all goes well!

  7. john, on November 7th, 2008 at 7:14 am, said:

    can you show me a utorial how to get a ordinary image to look like the one in the middle of three??

  8. gfxdude, on February 16th, 2009 at 5:44 pm, said:

    Hey very nice blog!! Man .. Beautiful .. Amazing .. I will bookmark your blog and take the feeds also…

  9. Rob Cubbon, on February 22nd, 2009 at 1:33 pm, said:

    Hi john, that’s done by tracing over it in Illustrator.

    Thanks gfxdude, hope you see more useful design and graphics stuff.

  10. charlene, on March 3rd, 2009 at 2:37 pm, said:

    nice work!! can you tell me,
    how can the middle picture be done in photoshop?

  11. Bernd Foto in Glas, on November 7th, 2009 at 7:30 am, said:

    Thanks for this Blog!

  12. Rob Cubbon, on December 26th, 2009 at 11:00 am, said:

    charlene, the middle picture can be done in Photoshop with the pen tool. I did it similarly in Illustrator, however.

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