Retro Comic Book

January 5, 2011, my school brought us to New York City, to go see Lion King, on Broadway. We had to get up at five in the morning so we could leave by six AM. My friends and I were so exited. We decide to take photos to record our trip. When I was looking back on the photos I had this amazing idea. I thought, “This would make a great comic book photo, and it would help me always remember the trip.”
The first step I did, I gave the photo an illustrated look with some graininess, to give the illusion of an old photo on bad quality paper. This is not a realistic effect; it is just some distortion to the original image to help me achieve the final look. I did this by going to (FILTERS > ARTISTIC > FILM GRAIN.) After this I had to decide what type of graininess I was going to use, in this case I used (GRAIN: 4, HIGHLIGHT AREA: 0, INTENSITY: 10).
Next I duplicated the layer and named the new layer halftone. I applied a halftone pattern, which is a type of coloration that sort of looks like bigger dots of color are used to make up the picture. This gives the image a look of an old comic book. I did this by going to (FILTER > PIXELATE > COLOR HALFTONE.) This was my favorite part because I actually got to see the major change in the photo.
Then I set maximum radius: 4 (and I left the rest with the default values.) this helped enhance the colors. In particular, I was trying to improve the red colors by brightening them. Then I went to the layers palette and set the blend mode to darken. This caused the lighter shades to pop out more. i liked these effects because it attracted my eyes to the subject of the photo due to the fact that the colors were more separated from each other.
I selected the halftone layer then I added a new layer and drew a small rectangle at the top left of the frame of the image. I painted it orange. I drew another rectangle, a bit larger this time, on the lower right corner of the picture, and painted it white. Then I used the typing tool to at my text into each box. The results are that I created a retro comic book sketch of my friend and I.