Another Simple Vector Tutorial (by Vered)

NOTE: This tutorial was created in Photoshop 7 but should be suitable for Photoshop 6. Also, this tutorial assumes you understand Photoshop layers and the location of photoshop tools.

1. Choose an image for to turn into your vector. Here's mine (yup... my little pride and joy...):

2. Using the pen tool, select the image - i.e., slowly add point to point around the image you wish to vectorize. To make the selection precise I'd suggest working in a zoom of 200% so you can capture as many points as possible:

3. Finally close the path by clicking the first point you made. This is what the closed path should look like:

4. Now we need to turn the path into a selection. Go to the "Path" pallette to do this. Click the circled item in the following image:

5. And here's your selected image:

6. Press CTRL+C to copy the selection to an *invisible* clipboard. Then go to the "File" menu and choose "New" - the dimensions should be the precise size of the image you just copied, but I'd like to make the new image slightly bigger for comfort's sake, so say your new image is 300x400, make it 340x440 (just an example - basically add like 40 pixels to the height and width). Now press CTRL+V to paste your image into the new background:

7. Make sure your foreground and background colours are set to black and white . Then make a duplicate layer of the original image (the one you just pasted), and hide the original layer, then go to the "Filter" manu => "Sketch" => "Note paper", and follow these settings:

8. This is the result:

9. Make another copy of the original image, hide the original, drag the copy to the top, and then run the notepaper filter agin, but slightly raise the "image balance":

10. Now set the new 'notepader' layer to the "multiply" blending mode:

11. Make another duplicate of the original, hide original, drag copy to top, run notepaper filter again, raise image balance some more, set that layer to multiply as well:

12. Basically you can continue doing this until you are happy and you can get something along these lines:

13. What we will do for our tutorial is use less levels - i.e., make like three layers of notepaper images, and make the image balance differences more drastic (first layer use 19, then 25, then 33, for instance). The end result should be something like this:

14. Now, while on the first original image (the very very first layer with the original colour image... i.e., the hidden one), hold the CTRL key on your keyboard and click on that layer. This will give you a selection around the image:

15. Now go to the "Edit" menu => "Copy merged". This creates a copy of the merged image. Now to paste it right above the current image, go to "Edit" => "Paste into".

16. Now go to the "Filter" menu => "Noise" => "Median Noise" and set the radius to 1 or 2:

Basically we now already have a vectored image... but I'd like to colourize it too...

17. So now we copy the original image and drag it up top. On the layer within the layer pallette click the layer you just copied and dragged and keep the CTRL button clicked as well - this will select the image. Then we go to "Filter" => "Noise" => "Median noise":

18. Make two more duplicates of the layer with the median noise effect and hide the two top most layers.

19. Now set the first median layer to "color burn" mode:

20. Reveal the next median layer and set it to "darken" mode:

21. Reveal the final layer and set it to "overlay" mode:

22. For the final touch click the very first original layer while holding the CTRL key down in order to select the original image shape, then go to the "Edit" menu and choose "Copy merged", then make sure you have the top most layer selected (all the while you must have the original image shape selection available), and go to "Edit" again and choose "paste into". You will get the merged image within a mask. Now all you gotta do is go to "Filter" and run "Pain daubs":

20. And here's the final result (I used "Hard light" blending mode on the final layer, but you dn't have to):

It's plenty of stages, but once you get the basic idea it's a piece'o'cake!

Tutorial by Vered