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Help achieving “xeroxed to death” look


anxiety

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I’m tying to get this look without using an old xerox machine. I’ve been told it can be done in photoshop but I’m not getting anywhere on my own. Anyone have any tips for me? Here are examples:
 

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Rich54

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I experimented and came up with this Before & After. Let me know if something like this is what you're after and I'll show you the steps. There are probably several other ways of achieving this effect that others may come up with.

Jessica Alba.jpgAfter.jpg
 

anxiety

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I experimented and came up with this Before & After. Let me know if something like this is what you're after and I'll show you the steps. There are probably several other ways of achieving this effect that others may come up with.

View attachment 88937View attachment 88938
Definitely close but not quite there. Needs that almost diffusion/stiply sort of degraded quality. I’ve been wrestling with this for a long time. Wish I could figure it out.
 

anxiety

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I would too actually, now that I think about it. While it doesn’t match my examples it could be a great launching pad to mess around a bit more.
 

Rich54

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Sorry for the delay... my internet service was down most of the day. Here are the steps I used:

1. Create a new layer above the original image and fill it with black. Change the blend mode to Hue. (Alternatively, create a duplicate of your background layer and convert to Black & White.)
2. On a new layer above the black layer, press Shft+Ctrl+Alt+E (stamp visible).
3. Change the blend mode of this layer to Divide. At this point your top layer should be almost entirely white. Then gradually apply Gaussian Blur until an image begins to emerge. The amount of blur to use is trial & error, but my final result of this particular step looked like this:
Image.jpg

4. Copy this to a new layer by again applying Stamp Visible. Then go to Filter>Artistic>Poster Edges. I used Edge Thickness = 4; Edge Intensity = 4; Posterization = 0.
5. The final step is to add a Threshold adjustment layer. I set the slider all the way to the right.

This all sounds very scientific like I knew exactly what I was doing, but I only had a vague idea of how it would turn out. Steps 1-3 are a known technique for converting an image to a line drawing (if you apply less Gaussian Blur than what I did here). From there I was just making things up to get to a point with a lot of heavy black lines and lots of white areas, similar to what multiple Xeroxing does.

Happy experimenting.
 

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