Cartoonization Process Overview –
A Tutorial on Turning Photograph into Cartoon

A lot of people asked us how do we turn real photos into cartoon pictures, what software / program should be used, what tools we are using. A lot of requests asked us for a tutorial on creating a cartoon photo with amazing likeness to the real person (see some samples). Many curiosities arose on how to turn photo to cartoon (cartooning).

Let’s take a quick look on the step-by-step cartoonization process. More details and the drawing techniques will be explained in another tutorials.

In this tutorial we assume that you already familiar with your computer drawing software.

Step by step cartoonization process:

Step 1:

Open the photograph to be cartoonized with your computer drawing software (you can use gimp or photoshop, or any other good photo editor software).

Step 2:

Isolate the object. Clear out all unwanted parts of the photograph.

Step 3:

Create the outline of the picture.

Step 4:

Add color to each part of the picture.

For this example, our first part to be colorized is the skin…

next, the vest…

and then the shirt…

neck tie…

hat…

hair…

the eyes…

and lips.

Step 5:

Now that we’ve done coloring the picture, let’s apply some shading to give depth to the picture.

Step 6:

Last step. Add a background.

That’s it!
Now we have the cartoonized version of our photograph.