Mike DelGaudio

Have you ever seen that “Marilyn” poster by Andy Warhol?

I like the pop-art feel of this poster and wanted to see if I could do it myself. Here is what I created:

Turns out, with Picasa — the photo editing software from Google — this is pretty doggone easy.

If you don’t have Picasa, you should.

Lets see how to do this!

First we’ll start with a portrait. Here is one of my daughter, that would otherwise be a throwaway pic.

First thing we do, is crop it to a square, in true Andy Warhol style.

Then we start creating our different quadrants. This is the fun part.

Take your cropped image and go to the tuning tab. Crank up the highlights and shadows slider. Then, slide up the Fill Light slider until you have something like this:

If you like the way this looks, choose “File” then “Save a copy”. This will make a copy of the picture into the same folder. This is your first quadrant:

Next, Apply a tint to the picture.
Go to the Effects Tab, then Click Tint. In the color chooser, choose a color that you like, then slide the Color Preservation slider all the way to the right. Like this:

Again, do a File | Save a copy. This is your second quadrant.

Ok, Undo All those changes except the crop. Once you are back to the image, change it to a black and white picture. (Effects tab, B&W)

Go back to the tuning tab and again, drag Highlights and Shadows all the way to the right. Drag Fill Light up until it looks good. Go back to the Effects Tab and Tint it again. Do a “File” then “Save a Copy”. This is your third quadrant.

One more time, undo all those changes except Crop.

This time Go to the Effects tab and go To “Saturation” then slide the Saturation slider all the way to the left. Switch over to tuning and slide those sliders the same way again. Repeat the tint effect with another color.

Do a final “File” | “Save a Copy” and you should now have four images in your folder that we created.

Select each of the 4 images, CTRL + CLICK each one. The four images should appear in the photo tray in the lower left hand corner of Picasa. Now we will create a Picture Grid Collage:

Go to “Create” then “Picture Collage”. In the “type” pull down menu, choose “Picture Grid”.

If you want to rearrange the pictures in the grid then click the Thumbnail of the image.

Voila, as they say. You have you’re very own pop art! Why not upload yours to Flickr and show us what you created!

Here is another version:

[tags]Mike DelGaudio, Picasa, photo editing, technique, warhol[/tags]