Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

Earlier this year I wrote about simple Photoshop tricks to make your photos look like painting… This afternoon I wrote a very primitive (but one-click) filter for converting photos into comics (download). It's tuned to run on photos that are 1200 pixels across (but it can work on any size), and expects that after running you rescale the image to 50% (or the linework will be fuzzy) and then pump up the saturation manually. Here's a few examples of it at work; this is without any hand processing.

It works by cloning your image and running a poster edges command, which it then lightens and smooths a little and darken-merges into your original image (ie. creating outlines). Then a combination of smart blur and cutout filters are run. It's a little more complicated than that but that's pretty much all it does. It's far from an ideal result but if you need something in a few seconds it works nicely.

PS. The filter works on PS 8.0; I haven't tested it on anything else.