: What preparations can be done to a photo to make it a little easier to then illustrate? I'm working on a program that will require a lot of flat styled vectored images. I'm very comfortable

@Sims5801359

Alright I'll give it a quick whirl. I'm using unsplash.com/photos/VGpp0LcHZT4 as the image



I'll start by Duplicating that layer a few times so I've got some copies of it and then I'm going to use the Median Filter. Median Filter is a great tool to find the average color of a region giving it almost a paint like quality. This first pass I'm looking at the overall image only:



Now I'll use one of those handy duplicates looking at the eye and other detail areas.



Hold Alt, click mask, paint in the details. I did the eye and a little bit of the beak:



Alright now I'm going to Stamp Layer Ctrl+Alt+Shift+E which will give me a new copy of everything as one layer. Then I'll Posterize that layer:



Going to Duplicate this Posterize layer. On the bottom (original Poster layer) I'll change blend mode to Soft Light. On this new one I'm going to do Filter > Find Edges:



Then I'll use Hue/Saturation to desaturate the lines then change their mode to Darken and adjust the Opacity to your needs:



Then as a final step in the prep you can add a layer between the lines and the image with a solid tone (some shade of gray) and lighten its opacity to help you see the line work:



I would then bring this into Illustrator to draw these segments. Start with the largest shapes first. Keep the PSD open in Photoshop so you can reference the different layers as you go. And since you mention struggling to see lights and darks you can always create Luminosity Masks or create a Palette in the HSL or LAB color space if it helps you.

Hope this helps you. The other thing that will get you illustrating quicker is a lot of practice and making sure you're using the Pen tool well.

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@Fox8063795

Threshold is your friend for turning complex, high-detailed photos into simplified black and white versions in Photoshop. Going from the threshold version will often give you better solid outlines to work over in vector illustration. This is just one technique, but it's one that I have been using before Illustrator introduced Live Trace, and one I still use today to simplify reference photos before illustrating.

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@Ann6370331

Your probably better off using illustrator to get a vector image out of a non vector.

Illustrator has a nice auto trace feature. While not 100% perfect it can get the job done in some images with the right set of information in the image.

Just open the image in Illustrator and click the auto trace button in the toolbar.

If that doesn't work with the right quailty then you may be out of luck and will have to hand do it all

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@Si6392903

This will be a very short answer.

Look for "Cartoon Photoshop" www.google.com/search?q=cartoon+photoshop
There are a lot of tutorials and processes.

The basics probably are some kind of posterize (color reduction), edge detection, saturation.

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