How do I create an atari style computer game 8 bit image from a photo?
In addition to posterizing graphics programs normally have an effect called something like “Pixelate”. If I were doing this I would probably convert the original image into greyscale first – then posterise it down to just a few colours (shades really). Apply pixelation to the level you want – then manually colour the whole thing in again. That gives you more control of what gets coloured what. Finally bear in mind the the original games designers often used layering of game sprites. You can see this in the IT Crowd example you have linked to where they have used “Tank Command” style green wireframes. So you could try that approach too. Here are some fonts that might work well if you need them.
All your examples were pixel-drawn by hand. Getting something that looks anywhere near as good through an automatic process I think is basically impossible (but ask again in 15 years). Since these are basically cartoons, you want to use cartoony techniques, and do stuff by hand. You are going to be throwing away a lot of visual information. The shadows and textures are not necessary to the image, but it’s very difficult for the software to recognize that they’re irrelevant – often the shadows and highlights will have stronger contrast than the features you are interested in: e.g., figure vs ground, or skin vs hair. I took a photo of my roommate, Dzin, and fooled around for about an hour and came up with this. (original) I’m pretty good at photoshop but I’m not at all good at drawing. What I did was use the pen tool to trace a few shapes – the face, the hair, the shades, the shi
