Photoshop Question

[Holli Conley]

Do any of you photoshop wizzes know how to make a photograph look like a cartoon? Our company wants to take a photo of us dressed as the Peanut Gallery gang standing around a Christmas tree for our "Charlie Brown Christmas" themed Christmas greeting card. Any ideas of how to make this photo into an effective Holiday card? Thanks in advance for any advice you can give me!

[Wally]

Depends on how in depth you wanna go. Plenty of tutorials out there, but honestly, in my experience, if you're not trying to caricature someone, simply cartooning them is a fairly laborious process. Now if you just want something simple, Befunky.com has some neat tools that'll have your card moving along quickly, you'll just need to crop 'em and use some layer masks after that.

http://www.befunky.com/create/photo-effects/Cartoonizer/

[Holli Conley]

Thanks Wally! I was really thinking more of cartoonizing the background rather than the people (and yes simple is absolutely what I want! :)), but I will look up befunky.com and see what I can come up with!

[Wally]

Oh, I follow you now. I thought you meant photochopping your faces into the image. Sorry 'bout that. I guess that same theory applies though with befunky.com. Let us know what you come up with!

[Tanya Baker]

Do you have Illustrator? You can always place your photo into illustrator - do a "live trace" with custom options - select 16-133 (or more colors) - adjust the Resample - corner angle, minimum area with the preview checked until you get the effect you want. I used Max colors 16 / Resample 100 / Path fitting 2px / Minimum area 8 px / Corner angle 15
It gave me a rough cartoon looking image. Once you get this the way you want - click okay and then click on LIVE PAINT and it will be converted from a photo image to a vector (cartoon) image.
Here's a sample in this word file. Has the original clip art photo and the illustrator conversion.