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If you ever find yourself needing a piece of “art” and only have a photo to work with, then have I got a tip for you.

The process is fairly simple, but it does require Illustrator and photoshop. I am still working with CS2 at work and at home, so the steps I outline here will be for that version of the software.

Step 1: pick a photo

First, select the photo you want to use, I chose this panorama of the Asbury College campus:

First things first, we need to open up Illustrator and create a new document. Once the document is ready to go, you need to select “Place” from the File menu. This will launch an “open file” dialog. Find your image, and choose “place”.

Anyway, I hope this helps someone who is looking to achieve the same effect, quickly.

Once the image has been placed in your document, click on it once to select it, and then go to the “object” menu and select the “live trace” submenu, and then select “trace options” since we need to tweak the settings a bit.

Once the new dialog comes up, click on “preview” so you can see what effect your changes are having in real time, and then start adjusting the values. For my image, I chose the following to modify the Mode. Setting it to “grayscale” allows us to maintain a goodly number of the gradients and natural shadows in the photo.

For my image, I didn’t need to change anything else, but depending on the complexity of your image, you might need to munge the Threshold a bit.

Step 2: Working with your new vector art

Now that you have converted your photo to vector art, it is time to save it as an EPS and import it into photoshop. Be sure to NOT overwrite your original photo, since you will need it again in a moment.

Once you have saved your art, you can quit Illustrator and switch to Photoshop. Open your art and set the resolution and size to whatever paramters you want, I usually make the file fairly large, something like 8 x 10 at 300 pixels per inch, and then when I am done I resize it. Now that you have rendered your art in Photoshop, select “place” from the file menu and place the original photo.

Move it behind the art layer and set its opacity to 65% and fill to 54%. Now set the art layer to overlay, and you should be good. Again you might need to play around with your values a bit to get the effect you want, depending on the complexity of your image.

Hey look, a watercolor

These values worked for me. Here is the result:

If you are wondering why I just didn’t use the “live paint” tool in Illustrator, the answer is two-fold:

I needed to do this fast, and I wanted to retain as much of the color complexity as I could from the original photo, and I am not as familiar with the inner workings of “live paint” as I should be. It would have taken me ages to achieve the same results, and I didn’t have that much time.