From Photography to Comic Art & Visual Storytelling

Open domain, Creative Commons, and stock photographs are a great resource for transmedia creators. Millions of photos can be downloaded and used in videos, motion graphics, and comics.

Using the photographs as they are will work for some photo comics, but other visual styles can be created using filters to process the photographs. This can give the images a more illustrative style that also makes their appearance much more consistent.

The images shown here are examples of what can be done with photographs from the Internet and some relatively simple work in Photoshop and a couple of other applications.

AKVIS Sketch

These photographs can be converted into sketch-like images with software like AKVIS Sketch. Multiple sketching styles are possible with this kind of software.

The first set of images (above) uses a relatively coarse style of sketch while the set below uses a more detailed style.

Photoshop with Oil Paint Filter

Adobe Photoshop has an oil paint filter built into it that can be used to manipulate photographs to give a painterly look of sorts. Other plugins to Photoshop can do even more sophisticated image progressing.

Photoshop, AKVIS Sketch & AKVIS ArtWork

The use of Photoshops layer blend options in conjunction with image filtering tools like Sketch and ArtWork give artists a great deal of flexibility in creating artistic styles for images. These images (below) were created using several layers of color and black-and-white images blended together in Photoshop.

NOTE: Open domain, Creative Commons, royalty free, and stock photos all mean different things. Even within these categories there can be different licensing conditions. For example, there are six different Creative Commons licenses. The type of license determines how you can use the image. Detailed information on sharing of Creative Commons images, music, and other creative works is at the Creative Commons website.

All of the images in this tutorial are based on photographs done by others. The photo manipulation was done by Peter von Stackelberg for instructional purposes only.