Pop art effect turns photos into icons

David Beckham pop art

I used a slightly different technique for the above picture of David Beckham than my earlier pop art example.

This time I put the Threshold layer (Image > Adjustments > Threshold) on the top and set it’s Layer Style to Multiply. Some of the underlying image was coloured in, some was Posterized (Image > Adjustments > Posterize). No matter what you do to the photo you can always tell who it is.

Osama Bin Laden pop art

A similar method was used for the above picture of Osama Bin Laden. There was incredible detail in the turban and the clothes that I kept from the photograph. I hand traced the colours on the face.

A important thing to remember about this sort of effect is that the flat colours and posterization mean that the image can be scaled up much larger than a similarly size photo can.

Lewis Hamilton pop art

I knew this picture of Lewis Hamilton with all his sponsorship logos would come up well with the posterize effect.

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This article was posted on Saturday, October 6th, 2007 at 5:24 pm and is filed under Photoshop.
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7 Responses to “Pop art effect turns photos into icons”

  1. Adventures In Hosting, on October 26th, 2007 at 5:01 pm, said:

    Osama an icon? I don’t know about that…but very cool nonetheless.

  2. Rob Cubbon, on October 27th, 2007 at 9:02 am, said:

    I was using the word “icon” to mean a person that is regarded as a symbol of something rather than a symbol of something good. I apologise if I have offended anyone. Thanks for the comment, Adventures In Hosting.

  3. LCDLOVE Daily Myspace Layouts, on November 13th, 2007 at 2:20 am, said:

    That looks awesome! I’m going to be using this tutorial on some of our new myspace layouts

  4. Rob Cubbon, on November 18th, 2007 at 10:14 am, said:

    Thank you, LCDLOVE Daily Myspace Layouts.

  5. scrgal9, on August 6th, 2008 at 9:36 pm, said:

    hey i love the one of david beckham you’ve really inspired me to design clothes like this

  6. Rob Cubbon, on August 9th, 2008 at 9:45 am, said:

    I’m glad you have been inspired, scrgal9, keep coming back for more!

  7. photo editing company, on September 17th, 2009 at 11:44 am, said:

    …nice samples
    we are also using that kind of pop-art effect on our samples…

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