Stylizing an image in Illustrator and Photoshop

Kat Martinez
Feb 24, 2017 · 2 min read
Various stages of stylization of an image for project 2 (left to right): the original image, a limited palette trace, a hue/saturation shift, and a blur over a hue shift.

I used both Illustrator and Photoshop to edit my photos. Illustrator was used to simplify the image with tracing, which made the later hue changes more contained. I still think I like the red and cyan color combo together best, but I think the orange and blue image is cleaner and captures the effect I was going for more effectively. Both of the bottom images had a fair bit of saturation and vibrance tweaking as well to emphasize the color contrasts, but the effect definitely works better in the orange/blue version. In the red/cyan version, the two-tone effect is not as distinct, with some of the cyan color fading to a muddy grey-brown. I’m not adept enough with Photoshop to know how to fix this, so it seems like this might be the end of the road for that version.

I’d like to use the orange/blue scheme for the vertical poster as well, but I’m not really sure how to place the image in a vertical layout. I haven’t really played around with the image I’d originally meant to use for the vertical layout, but now that I’ve gotten such a distinct color scheme, I think I’d like to try to make it work for the vertical layout as well.

    Kat Martinez

    Written by

    engineer content creator and part-time witch (they/them)

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