Designed exclusively for Adobe Create by Nuwan Panditha (also known as BlackNull), this free Photoshop action is easy to install and run—and it turns your portrait photos into very shareable (and even frameable!) cartoon-style illustrations.  

We encourage you to use the action in both personal and commercial projects—and when you share your work on Twitter or Instagram, please tag @AdobeCreate so we can admire it! And share the action with a friend by sending them to this page! (However, please don’t redistribute the action.)

Before You Start

1. This action was tested on images as large as 5,000 pixels; a good resolution to work with is around 3,000 pixels. Low-resolution images will result in a final image that is less detailed. Good candidates for this action are well-focused, well-lit images without too much white or black. Closeup portraits work well.

2. This action requires the Oil Paint filter in order to work. Open your image, select a layer, and go to Filter > Stylize > Oil Paint to make sure that the filter is available. If it is not available, follow these steps: 

Make sure that image you’re working with is in RGB mode and 8-bit mode (Image > Mode). Go to Edit > Preferences > Performance, and make sure the Use Graphic Processor option is active. While you’re here, click on Advanced Settings in the Graphics Processor Settings pane and make sure Use OpenCL is active. (If OpenCL is not available, there may be an issue with your graphics card. For more help, visit this help page.) 

2. Now install the patterns. In 2020 versions of Photoshop, open the Patterns panel (Windows > Patterns). In this panel, click on the menu icon at the top right corner, select Import Patterns, and select the file Toon Artist - Patterns. (In versions of Photoshop prior to CC 2020, go to Edit > Presets > Presets Manager. In this panel, select Patterns as Preset Type, click on Load, and select the file Toon Artist – Patterns.)

Image Setup 

1. Toon Artist creates a text effect that can be customized after you run the action. If you want to add text, keep its placement in mind when you crop your image.

2. Set the area of the image that the action will focus on. First, create a new layer. On the new layer, draw over the subject of the image (covering it); the action will rename this layer “focus” and isolate that portion of the image you’ve drawn over. Using a brush with a hard edge (with hardness set to 100% and spacing set to 10%) is an easy way to do this. (There is plenty of room for experimentation in this step. You can draw very precisely following the outline of a subject, but as a first test, you may want to start with a quickly drawn area using a large brush.)

Applying the Action

1. Before applying the action, make sure there are just two layers in your file: the image, and above that the layer with the drawn area.

2. Open the Actions panel, select the Toon Artist action, and click on the play icon. The playback time can vary depending on several factors; for a 3,000-pixel image, it should be around three or four minutes.

When the playback finishes, the message Render Completed will appear; click on Continue to close it.

3. If you’re happy with the way the image looks, you can stop here, but results are highly customizable via the layers it has created in your image. 

There are now many opened groups in the Layers panel. To quickly organize them, hold down the alt (Windows) or option (Mac) key and click on the arrow of the main Toon Artist group. Then release the key. When you open the group, all its layers will be shown in an organized way.

Layer Structure

Inside the Toon Artist group, there are a few subgroups and layers. To see what each one does, hide and unhide them one by one, starting from the top (more detail on each layer is in the video and in the user guide in the downloads folder):

There a lot of layers, but the structure is very simple: 

• There is a layer group for the background color: BG Color
  
• There are three groups with background elements: BG patterns, BG FX, and Border FX.
• There are three groups with the toon effect: Toon Color, Toon Lines, and Toon Details. 
• There are two groups of additional effects and a text layer: FG FX, Post FX, and Replace With Your Text. 

Most layers generated by the action share a few simple editing methods that will allow you to highly customize the image. 

Masks: All the layers and groups have a mask channel that can be used to hide or reveal parts of a layer. To do so, click on the mask channel of a layer, select the Brush tool and either white or black as the color, and then paint over the image. Using black will hide the painted parts of the layer; using white will reveal parts of the layer. You can view the mask channel by alt-clicking (Windows) or option-clicking (Mac) on it, mute or unmute it by shift-clicking on it, and invert it by selecting it and pressing ctrl-I (Windows) or command-I (Mac)

Blending Modes: You can modify the blending mode and opacity/fill of all layers and groups by using the controls in the top part of the Layers panel or by double-clicking on the layer, which opens the Layer Style dialog box.

Duplicate Layers: You can duplicate layers by pressing ctrl-J (Windows) or command-J (Mac). You can then modify the duplicate layer and mix it with the original one to make variations. You can also move, scale, and rotate layers with the Transform tool.

Layer Styles: Most of the graphical elements have a layer style or a filter that can be modified; you can access them by clicking on the arrow at the right of the layer. Then double-click on the style or filter to edit it.