How to create a Halftone Duotone Cutout Effect in Adobe Photoshop

 

INTRODUCTION 

Hey Guys in this Photoshop tutorial I'm going to teach you how to take your regular photo and turn it into this cool halftone duotone style cutout effect so let's begin just working on our original photo and our life is actually pretty easy here because Photoshop has all these automatic cutout tools so although you could use the polygonal 

POLYGONAL

so tool to get a rough sort of cut out like this you know that's one thing you can do in this case I'm just going to highlight the object selection tool and I'm going to just create a rectangular Marquee around the subject so if this doesn't work for your photo if your photo is more complicated then you can use the other options so in this case we've got a good selection there is just this little chip on the shoulder of the jacket and in that case I can grab my polygonal lasso tool or other lasso tool just make sure 

SELECTION MODE

I'm working on add to selection mode up here in the toolbar and click and just sort of fill in that patch the nice part is we are not worried if it's not an exact cut because this is a cut out style anyway the next thing I'm going to do is go to select modify expand so in order to get that rough cut out look I'm going to expand the selection by something like 10 or 20 pixels it just depends on how big your original photo is but you can see now we've got a little bit of a breathing room not so right up on the edge of the person the next thing

SMART OBJECT

 I'm going to do is right click and layer via copy this is going to take our selection and copy it onto its own layer and then we can begin working with this copy so firstly I'm going to right click on this layer and convert it to a Smart object so that when whenever we apply effects onto this we can always go back and adjust them later and things are not so permanent so the first thing we're going to do is go to image adjustments threshold and this will just create a black and white threshold and you can move the middle points over or the levels so that you get a decent outline based on the contrast in your selection

SMART FILTER

 so something around there is fine for me it's really a matter of taste and I'll press OK and since we created a smart filter a smart object you see the smart filters pop up and we can always double click on this threshold and change it later if we want we can even hide it and this little other button here to the right we can double click to actually adjust the opacity of it or even make it a blending mode so we're not going to do that in this case but that's just a useful thing to know the next thing I'm going to do is add a half tone effect

FILTER PIXELATE COLOR

 so I'm going to go to filter pixelate color halftone here I would recommend taking a few moments to play around with what different settings look like the max radius the bigger it is the bigger the color halftones are going to be so if I use something like 15 you'll see what that looks like and then the screen angles and if I press OK you could see what these degree angles look like especially if I zoom in a lot here you can see what happens but I would encourage you to play around with different options of where you want to place the angles so I'm going to go to image adjustments gradient map and here is where we can create any color gradient we want

COLOR PICKER

 so whether you want to just play around with the different presets I find that maybe those are not the best or you can just click on the gradient and make your own so typically we can start with one dark color for what was our black or shadows and then a complementary light color this is where you can get creative and choose whatever you want a another quick tip here is in the Color Picker uh normally it's just it's just on Hue mode but you'll also have these other sections like let's say you find a yellow that you like but you want it to be a little bit brighter you can go to saturation make sure it's it's the most saturated or or less saturated yellow or you can go to lightness the L and make sure it's a little bit lighter for more contrast 

GRADIENT

so just a quick tip in the Color Picker you can switch different modes to really dial in on just one aspect of one color so once you're happy with your gradient you can press OK if you need to flip it around you can press reverse just in case and in fact there's no reason that it has to just be duotone you can even add like a slight third color it won't really make much of a difference but you can get some of the fringes of that color half tone in a third colors and as a final touch one thing I've done is Right clicked on the layer went to blending options and then press stroke and you can even add like a white stroke on top of this depending on how clean your cutout was this will look better or not and I can press ok

PRETTY SIMPLE PROCESS

 now this is a pretty simple process it might took long because I was explaining it to you but once you've done it once you can essentially just repeat this pretty quickly for each individual subject and you can create different colors make each one stand out but in fact if you were going to just put make them all the same color then there's no reason to even cut them all out individually you could just make sure you're working on add to selection mode and you can actually select everyone all at once Photoshop should be able to handle any photo that's similar to this and in fact I can just cut out all of them at once layer via copy and do the whole process here just on the group 

CHANGE THE BACKGROUND

so there's no reason even to need to do everything individually and another cool thing is if you've recently applied an effect it'll always be at the top of your most recent filter so I can just click on it and it'll automatically apply that and then I can add whatever gradient I want in fact it looks pretty cool as black and white to be honest but you get the idea it's up to you and another final thing I've done is you can change the background to be something so whether you want to add a color halftone on the original photos background or just make the original background some kind of gradient 

PAPER TEXTURE

so you can apply text onto it or something or even another idea is to throw on a different background completely so here's a paper texture scan and I can add that as the background instead and the cool part is when you cut out stuff like this there's no nothing stopping you from rearranging stuff pressing command T to edit transform so I can even free transform stuff move it around to my liking and really make whatever I want out of this cool design style feel free to experiment there's definitely lots of room to tweak things and and slight adjustments on the effects but this is just a basic model and formula for something like this style if you want more Photoshop tutorials tips and tricks 

CONCLUSION

I've got a playlist with hundreds of them on my channel so you can check out another one of those And subscribe to my channel here on YouTube to stay tuned for all of my videos my name is Justin odisho thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video

ALL-MATERIALS