Can you dig up a piece of reference that is the sort of artwork you're trying to emulate?

Lemme take a swing at it real quick and see what I can come up with that's more or less intermediate in terms of PS skill, but looks alright.

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.

@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!

@Ash: I'm not sure I know what you mean by "smoothing it out with levels". Whenever I've messed with basic levels adjustments, it changes the brightness, contrast, and WB...but it doesn't mess with the texture of the image all that much. Or am I missing something?

I've tried the film grain & half tones, and it generally came out kind of a mess. Again, could totally be my fault...but I couldn't find the balance of making look like artwork without losing so much detail that it looks nearly abstract.

@Allison: Wow...never heard of Topaz plug-ins before, but those are crazy. I'm thinking I might have to try the 30-day trial, because there certainly seems to be some serious horsepower to those filters. Some look like they'd work really well for what I'm trying to achieve. The cost kind of sucks, so if I can get there some other way, that'd be better -- but I think that barring something else coming up, it might be worth 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.

Errr... I wish I remembered. I just played around with the image. Levels -> stamp on one layer and levels -> edges -> equalize on top (I think) with transfer mode set to darken and some color balance.