[Hall of tricks]

A while ago, I was looking for a way to convert a picture to an image that a child could color with crayons. Accidentally (like it is often the case), I use three easy effects that does just that. The image below is an interesting example of this. It comes from one of the images in the PI6 Album (The Building album, image 0204017L.JPG)

Note: I did this in PI 6.0 but it can also be done using 5.0 using one extra command. 

Open your image in PhotoImpact. In case you're not familiar with importing an image from an album in PI, here are the steps:

• Insert the PhotoImpact 6.0 CD.
• Look at the very top right of PI's screen, you'll see a Switch command. Click it and choose PhotoImpact Album.
• On the left are all the albums, find the Building album.  If you can't find it, choose File/Open, in the Look In drop-down list select the CD. On the CD, double-click the Samples\Albums folders. Select Building.ab3 then click Open.
• Find an image you like or choose the one I used.
• Right-click on the image and select Open. The image will open in PI. If you still use PI 4.2, find an image of your choice, right-click and choose Copy/Thumbnail then paste it in PI. 

Let's see how this is done in PI6. The extra step to follow to do the same thing in PI5 can be found after.

• Using the Transform button and the Resize tool, optionally resize your image to a reasonable dimension.
• Choose Effect/Special/Monochrome. This will turn your image into a gray shaded image while still an RGB TrueColor 24Bit image. This is a new feature in PI6.0
• The next step is to reduce the number of different gray colors used in the image. From the Format menu, choose Level. In the Options and use the slider to set a value of 4, 5 or 6 depending in the number of details. With threes it's better to use a lower value. If a large portion of your image shows the sky, you could use 6 or 7.
• Finally, choose Effect/Natural Painting/Colored Pen. Use the slider to set the Level to 100.

There you go. I was suggested that you can also achieve great results by using a value of about 60 or 70 to have the areas filled with different shades of gray. This way you can use these to recolor the image. For instance, using the Magic Wand tool with a very low value for the Similarity, you can easily select the different shades of gray and 'play' with each of them

In PI5, the extra steps you need to do are to first convert the image to shades of gray by selecting Format/Data Type/16 Bit Grayscale or more simply Grayscale 8 Bit. This will create a new image of that data type. You then need to re-convert it to RGB TrueColor from that same menu. If you don't do that, you won't be able to use the Colored Pen command.

Once done, you can apply different effects to the image to give it a hand drawn appearance. The following is the same image as above. I used the Magic Wand tool to select enclosed regions and applied different colors.