How-To’s Day: Photoshop: Non-Destructive Posterization Technique Through Adjustment Layers

Oct 19, 2004, 11:30 AM ET

BY Pariah S. Burke

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Adobe’s Senior Digital Imaging Evengelist, Julieanne Kost, shows off Photoshop CS’s nimble adjustment layers with a sweet technique for dramatically posterizing a photo—without distructive manipulation of the original photo.

This tip and technique demonstrates how to reduce the color palette of an image to create a posterized effect with the most control possible. Although Adobe Photoshop CS has a filter that automatically creates posterized images, it works on all channels simultaneously. The unique approach described here, allows for more flexibility by converting an image to grayscale so that the number of posterized levels can be specifically applied and colors assigned as desired.

$Before and after images from Julieanne Kost\'s \'Posterization Techniques\' photoshop tutorial$