I think, in the next Trek film, the villain should be The Borg.

*runs and hides*

The Europa Report trailer does 2 things for me...

1. It makes me think it could be a really cool hard sci-fi picture.
2. It makes me worry that the "monster flick" aspect will ruin it.

@Ash: Yeah, the first image is what I was normally ending up with. And I generally felt that a comic consisting of that all the way through would have people putting it down without giving it a chance -- it's just too harsh on the eye, to me at least (If you/anyone disagree, feel free to tell me). The latter ones do look better, and I guess if need be I could shoot the photos with that in mind. After the cutout was added, that's not too bad.

The bottom one "series of images" you created looks very good! I'd prefer color, but that certainly looks more like a comic than I've been able to produce using my limited knowledge base.

@Tomahawk: Yeah, I wasn't expecting a 5-min conversion. I've tried enough combinations of filters and tutorials to know that I just can't get something that looks decent without doing more work. I always assumed that some masking and brush work would be needed if I was ever going to get this to work. Even with the Topaz filters, I expect more work is involved than "open, apply filter, save".

I just need to avoid having to paint from scratch, as I don't have the skill or tech to really undertake that. And obviously spending 15 hours on a single image, when I could have 400+ images to convert, is just not the most practical.

I'm willing to sacrifice quality, as that's the trade off for speed/ease -- but my belief was that the users around these parts would be able to help avoid as steep a trade off as I'd have to endure if I tried to figure it out myself. So far, that's certainly been the case...several of these are better than I did just "trying stuff" in photoshop, and I've gotten a handful of other ideas I intend to try later, as well.

If anyone else has done some tests, or has ideas, I'm still listening. Until I settle on a process and actually start the conversions, I'm totally open to changing and refining the process. I still have to shoot all the photos, as well...which is the pre-production phase I'm beginning now. So I do have a while, if y'all want to experiment.

@fireproof: I like the way the colors flattened out in that, but the black everywhere looks very "blah" to me. That's one of the issues I ran into with filter-only photoshop conversions as well. What I find interesting is that the more I look at the original image from Capt. America, the more I think that image looks pretty "comic book" on it's own. Never realized that. Good on the DP.

@Allison: I'm not familiar with "Topaz" filters/effects...so I'm off to YouTube to learn up!

Interesting...Fotosketcher looks like a decent start. I'd like to retain more detail in the faces, but the rest does look better than many of the filter combos I've tried. I'll add it to the list of things to play with.