There's no escaping this reality.

I got some images to illustrate the progression to a tri-color print. The image above (which doesn't seem to appear properly) was my original draft processed directly into illustrator for tracing. As I mentioned in a previous post it came out badly. There wasn't any definition to the details and the forms were generally oversimplified.




Having seen how this first draft came out in illustrator I realised I'd have to redefine and darken the edges myself. This is the original composition detailed with black in photoshop. It doesn't have to be perfect, this attempt was crude but the lines are simplified enough later it comes out fine.


I used the cutout filter in photoshop's filter gallery to get a real time approximation, pictured above, and it's already clear this version is better suited to this sort of processing. Cutout filter proved to be of lower fidelity than the live trace functions in illustrator though, so it was only useful for drafting an image and quickly previewing how it would survive tracing.This is the final product, in panels to compensate for the 24 in. screen width (height 14 in.). Unlike images processed by the cutout filter, the live traced prints are easily resized without unwanted pixilation.

This is the later after color separation in illustrator, which again yields better results than similar techniques in photoshop in my experiments. Three panels each with one of the three colors used make up the image in greyscale in the lower right corner.