Last week I posted an image up on flickr as part of the 365 Days project. Justin suggested I take the photo and mess with it in Photoshop. “It’s screaming frank-miller-filter of something,” he said.

Hmm. Frank Miller filter. Sin City. Cool posterized-yet-not look. Sure!

So I opened up my trusty Photoshop CS3 Beta and got to work.

Breaking it down

So if you look at Sin City, you have super contrast on all the characters, but there’s a little bit of gradient. Just the posterize filter isn’t enough. It’s that micro detail that makes it shine.

Original Image

The first step is to get rid of the color and set yourself up with a good black and white clean plate. To do this I used Image > Calculations. This lets you do a variety of layer operations by juxtaposing two channels as layers. I played around with them until I found something I liked. My settings (your milage may vary) were Blue in Channel 1 and Red in Channel 2 with the Overlay transfer mode at 100%. Remember that the blue channel will always have the most grain in it, even on a digital shot.

Black and White

From the base black and white image, I created three layers. The first I left alone, the second I applied the “stamp” filter to (tweaking the settings to get the lines where I wanted them), and to the third, the “torn edges” filter, again tweaking to taste.

Stamp

Torn Edges

Now all that was left was to mix them up. Turn both filtered layers to overlay and bam: You have yourself the comic book look. Tint skin to yellow at your discretion.

Final Image

Enjoy!