Cel-shading w/PS4

After playing Boarderlands (Xbox 360) which utilized cel-shading throughout the entire game, I got really curious about it. It is an extremely cool effect and after several hours of trial and error on photoshop.. I think I'm starting to come up with something close.

Doing this I used two layers, the bottom of which I used an edge-only high quality smart blur, inverted it, and used the artistic>cutout filter to clean it up a bit. On the top layer I used a heavy gaussian blur which I then Edit>Fade Gaussian Blur>100% Luminosity with the mode set at Darken. The last step is to put the two together by changing the blending mode of your layers to multiply.

You have to adjust the various values and settings throughout, and I have found that the best results come from images with bright colors and excellent color separation. Also, there is a lot to gain by adjusting the brightness/contrast on either layer.

A few of examples:
(click for larger images)

           
    

               

  

Just to give you a better idea of the kind of changes this impliments..

Original:


Cel-shading:


You'll notice that the quality of the Integra and the Boxer is extremely low. This happened because the image resolution was also low.

        

All in all this has been very worthwhile and extremely fun.

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