Lilahpops

Yet another reason to try out the special effects in iPhoto

Again, Cordelia has agreed to model for this installment in the iPhoto series of Tips and Tutorials. In this article we’ll make a cartoon effect using iPhoto.

I have a lot of photos of my cats and like many hobby photographers they can be very hit and miss. Sometimes, though, the expression caught in an otherwise ordinary photo makes deserves some post-processing.

The photo

Here we have a photo of my British Shorthair, Cordelia.

You can see that it’s quite grainy and blurry at the same time, very low light conditions and not exactly result I was hoping for. But the look on her face made me want to try to improve the photo somehow. So I decided to do a little more experimenting with iPhoto. In no time at all I had a cartoon/comic type of effect.

It’s all about smoothing the grain

The Reduce Noise option is the key to a cartoon effect. It smooths out all the grain in the image and almost gives it a paintbrush texture.

To start with I opened the Adjust settings and moved the Reduce Noise slider all the way to the right. Play around with this as you mightn’t need to always set this to maximum. In fact, I decreased it a little (to 89.0) as the effect made the image so smooth it became even more blurry. However, even with the decrease the eyes are still out of focus and as any eager amateur photographer knows - the eye have it.

So instead of decreasing the smooth paint-like effect even further I increased the Sharpness (to .71). Instantly the eyes stood out and the cartoon effect was still in tact. There was also more of an outline around the cat.

A few more minor adjustments

To polish up the final image I made a few more adjustments.

Levels and Contrast and Crop for an overall improvement. Saturation to bump up the color. The change I was most impressed with, possibly because I don’t use it very often, was the effect an adjustment to the Highlights setting produced.

Here is the Adjustments window showing the final settings.

And the final result. Voila!

If you have other iPhoto tips you’d like to share let us know in the comments. If you’d like to write a guest post about using iPhoto then get in touch with me via the Contact Form.

Related posts

• How to resize an image in iPhoto
• Add special effects to your images with iPhoto
• Use the tool in iPhoto to edit your images
• Duplicate an image in iPhoto

This entry was posted on Friday, August 1st, 2008 at 6:58 pm and is filed under Tips and Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.