After listing all of those plugins, I thought it would be a good idea to show a few ways in which to use them. One of the projects I was working on recently was a sort of illustrated look, a little comic book, a little pop art. I have commercial filters which do some of these, but wrote up a tutorial that uses only free filters.



The filters you'll need for this are Xero's SuperSmooth, Xero's Lithograph, and Martin Koch's Dither FREE. This is the original image.

1. Apply the SuperSmooth filter. (All images are not created equal and may need different settings!)
2. This is the result.
3. Duplicate image to a new layer.
4. Apply the Lithograph filter to the duplicated layer, using the default settings.
5. Layer settings: Soft light at 100% opacity, and the image should look like this.
6. Merge layers, then duplicate merged image to a new layer.
7. Apply the Dither FREE filter at the default setting.
8. Layer settings can be: Burn at 50% opacity, Overlay at 50% opacity, Soft Light at 50% opacity, or Hard Light at 50% opacity.
9. Merge, save.

For a slightly softer look (as shown in the preview), duplicate the final image to a new layer, with the layer settings at Normal and 30% opacity. Then apply a Gaussian Blur set to 5 and adjust the brightness/contrast at 15/10.

A few more variations to play with. I applied the Mehdi Posterizer plugin to the original image, which produced this result.

Then I came up with this effect by duplicating as a new layer then applying the Dither FREE random setting at Screen 50% opacity.

This worn, scratchy look was achieved by duplicating the image as a new layer and applying these settings to Xero's Soft Vignette filter, then changing the layer setting to Screen at 50%.

(( x-posted to icon_extras and psptutorials ))