Playing with Photoshop Filters

I was experimenting with Photoshop yesterday and I decided to play around with filters. I particularly enjoyed the "cutout" filter, where you are changing an image to make it look as though it was created by cutting out different colours of paper and then laying them on one another. The effect is like a cartoon or rotoscoped looking image, very cool.

So here I tried a couple to see how much detail I could remove from the image and still have it immediately recognizable as the person.

I think they end up looking like cartoonish logos or something. There is probably some application for this, but I have not quite come up with it yet. Therefore I will share with the people reading my page here.

First I did a nice one of Claudia. This is cut down to 4 layers, pretty extreme, but it is still clearly her. The source for this one was the series where Claudia presented Hawaiian toast.
Then I did one of Doris. It was hard to find ideal images for the process in some cases. they needed to have a certain amount of contrast and certain angles present to survive the reduction process. This one came out quite good too.Interestingly enough, I think I could have done this with about any picture of Ryan. It seems like he has a face with details that work very well with this process. Particularly when he has his scruffy unshaved communist look goingOf course, I had to do one with Liam too... I think it could be an album cover for an avant-garde band, what do you think? Any budding rock bands can certainly afford me... One last one that I think is OK, but not ideal. This was Bernhard and his girlfriend last Christmas, I think it is a decent result, but look at how Mandy's nose kind of vanished...Well, I think that is enough of that for now. I will have to think of something interesting for my next project. It is always nice to find a new bit of fun with my computer.