got a question...I am working on a game and my friends and I want to take pics of us and people who can model for our character with a digital camera and transform the pictures into a cartoony style like on the GTA loading screens. We have Adobe Photo 7.0 but is there like a plugin or a separate program we can do that with? Any suggestions?

I don''t think there is a plugin like that to suit your needs. Those characters on the loading screens are hand drawn.

Fractal Design Painter has some nice gadgets like "Auto-Van-Gogh"

you could always try messing about with the posterize filter... it can give quite a good cell shaded look....

im glad that such a plugin does not exist. Otherwise, us artists would be out of a job...

there is probably a way to make something like that, but im sure such skills and recourses are simply out of reach of anyone on this site...(try programming feature recognition)

http://members.aol.com/forrestbro/how_cartoon.html

Try that site. I haven''t tried it, but it looks like it would work.

Here''s how to do it;

First, you have to be able to draw that good. (Not covered here. Tutorials elsewhere on the internet)

Then you ink your drawing, or go over it in dark pencil (basicly get it as dark as you can) and erase all the unnesecary working lines.

Then you scan it, and increase the contrast so that you have perfect black lines on a perfect white background.

Make this a new layer in photoshop, set the layer type to "multiply", call it "line art" and make a new layer underneath and call it "colour". Drawing colour on this new layer will show through everywhere except where the line art layer is black, and the soft edges of the lines will blend nicely with the colours.

There are plenty of tutorials elsewhere on the net that go over what I just said in greater detail. Check the 2D/Computer/Graphic Art oriented websites.