The inauguration of the President of the United States on Tuesday 20th has activated many photographers to perpetuate the event. In addition to live photos people has created numerous posters with Mr. Barack Obama posing. I also wanted to commemorate this historical event with a poster made using Photoshop Elements 6.0 and two photos found on Flickr under Creative Commons license.
I first downloaded Barack’s portrait from his photo stream on Flickr. This picture is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
I removed the background and cropped the image to hide the microphones.
I then applied Poster Edges filter with zero edge thickness and intensity, and posterization set to 2. Next I added 50 % brightness to get clear colors. Finally, I flattened the image before applying the background. I copied the flattened image on a new layer in order to remove the white background color and then removed the background again.
I downloaded the flag of the United States from Andrew Powell’s photostream. This picture is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported license. I added 135 % brightness to clear the colors and remove shadows. I flattened the image to apply Cutout filter with edge simplicity set to 6, edge fidelity set to 2 and number of levels set to 8.
I copied the flag in the background of the portrait and adjusted the size and position. The poster was finished.
Final Words
Creations like this are very easy to do with modern photo manipulation software. Pictures become almost hand drawn with only a few keystrokes. Adding substantially brightness makes colors in photos clear and even more cartoon-like. I share this poster picture under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.