I almost called this thread Salvage III. But since my Salvage II thread went nowhere, I figured that was a death knell. Instead, I tricked you into viewing my post! (Sorry about that).
But seriously, since RFS' original thread got me to download the trial of Color EFex Pro, I have been playing with the addon before it goes poof on me. One thought I have had for some time was to create an image reminiscent of my early CGA monitor days. For those of you who never had a PC with a CGA monitor, let me explain. Back in the early 80s, PCs and their monitors were capable of 4 colors: white, black, cyan and magenta. That's it. Sorry. You get 4 colors. Further, the resolutions were horrible -- graphics were very blocky. So, my vision was to create a glamour portrait that was a throwback to that era -- limited to those colors and blocky.
I dug out some old slides (I wanted the image to be from the same era as CGA monitors) and chose one to work on for this project. Since I no longer have a working slide scanner, I set up my Canon 40D with the 100 2.8 macro lens above a piece of white plexiglass lit from below by a single strobe. This became my "copy stand" to give me a digital image from the slide. Here's a small version of what I got without any edits other than cropping and color correction:
After cleaning up and playing around with the image for an hour or so -- trying many different things and throwing most of it in the trash, I ended up with something close to my vision:
If you're interested, the steps to create this effect are:
1) Solarize the original image into a new layer to get the desired color (Color EFex Pro offers many options for solarization beyond the PS built-in solarize filter)
2) Filter -> Texture -> Craquelure the above image to a new layer to get the texture (I had been playing with mosaic tiles, which better represent pixels, but I found it too clean for what I wanted)
3) Mask (or erase) the texture from the model to bring the model off of the background.
That's it. Thought I'd share it. Comments, criticisms, thoughts and your own digital manipulations appreciated!