Start with a JPG or GIF file. If you use a GIF, increase the color depth
to 16 Million colors (Colors, Increase Color Depth: 16 Million Colors.)
The best photos to use are ones that are fairly light and have a lot of
contrast between objects and their backgrounds. If your photo is too dark,
try increasing the lightness (Colors, Adjust: Hue/Saturation/Lightness).
Here I've chosen a pic that I downloaded from Art
Today.
First, we add a little Noise. Go to Image, Noise:Add. Check Uniform
Noise and set the slider to 15. Your photo will get just a bit grainy.
After adding the noise, we sharpen the photo. For this image, I applied
the Sharpen More filter twice (Image, Sharpen: Sharpen More). Depending
on your photo, you may need to Sharpen or Sharpen More an additional time.
You should notice that the grainyness has increased considerably.
To complete the process, all we do is decrease the color depth to 2
colors (Colors, Decrease Color Depth: 2 Colors.) Check Grey Values as the
pallette component, Weighted for the pallette weight, and Nearest Color
for the reduction method. There you go...a pointilized image.
A quick word of advice, it may be necessary to clean up your image a
bit to get this tutorial to work. For example, if the sky in the photo
above had been too dark, I might have needed to select it with the lasoo
tool or Magic wand and lighten it to give the necessary contrast. Don't
worry if there are jagged areas when you're done. The conversion to dots
can hide a lot of tweaking.
Email me at State_of_Entropy@hotmail.com