[Brenda Ellis]

I first posterized the image. Then I created another document with just a white background. Then, I used the dropper tool and clicked with it on a color in the posterized image. That turned my "palette" to that color. I then went to my new document and created a square with the marquee tool, and used the paint bucket to fill that square with the color I had picked out of the posterized picture. I did this with every color I could see in the face and hair (except for obvious blacks and except for the eyes.)

The thing I don't know is how Photoshop arrives at those nine or so distinct colors from a photographed face. They very well may not be what I would want to use to recreate a painted image of the face in the original photo. If you zoom in on a photo in Photoshop or any digital program, you will see that many times, each pixel is a different color that, when zoomed out optically mixes to make the color on that particular thing in the photo. This is why for me it's been a challenge to get my colors from a digital image, because pixels don't act like paint; they display color differently than we do on canvas, so when I look closely at a color, it's hard to tell just what that color really is because it's a bunch of various colored pixels.

I hope some of that made sense. I have Photoshop 7 which I use a lot as a scenic designer. I think, however, that Photoshop Elements has those same tools that I mentioned.

Like I said, I don't know how really helpful those colors will be since the process of posterization is different from the process of mixing paint.

Thank you for suggesting it, though. By posterizing the colored image, I could actually see the various values as well as the discreet color areas.