Photoshop Tutorials: Simple Pop Art Effect

Written By Steve Patterson

In this Adobe Photoshop tutorial, we're going to see how to turn a photo into a simple 1950's and 60's pop art-style effect. If you can make a selection with the Lasso tool and you understand the basics of using layers in Photoshop, you have all the skills needed to create the effect. We're going to be using the Lasso tool, or the selection tool of your choice, a simple Threshold image adjustment, and a lot of solid color fill layers.

Best of all, when you're finished, all of the colors in the effect remain completely editable, so you can go back and change them any time you want, or make multiple versions of the same image using different colors, which is a popular thing to do with this effect.

Here's the image I'm going to be working on throughout this Photoshop tutorial:

And here's the pop art effect we're aiming for:

Let's get started.