Using With Photoshop

I want to first illustrate the idea of targeting colors using hand-crafted images from other programs. I was aiming to create something from the parade picture and created this image in Photoshop:

To further guide the mapping, I used the "color" layer style in Photoshop to pseudo-color the parade. And I wanted to do a hue-only mapping and get the colors to correlate. The results were awful (did I mention this program lets you create awful images? See bordering regions.)

Usually this problem can be helped by adding more mapping params. In this case I gave a hint of "value" and some saturation params (Hue 0.1, Saturation 1, Value 1500). Not bad! I like the way the purple on the tall skirts blends with what was originally black:

At this point I decided I hated the skittles color-scheme but didn't want to start over. I decided to apply a new color image to one of my photoshopped images and got this:

Ok, now this is interesting and not what I expected. This time I used the "used up" feature which tries to limit the colors to the ratios of the original color image. Other params were pretty specific: Hue 1, Sat 12, Visual 20, Location 10 (note, the lower the number the higher the probability that the feature will match).

I then wanted to take the result of that and apply it to my original parade image and see what happens:

That's ok, but I realized I liked the previous image better. It's got a more abstract look to it. I then decided to try adding some shape definition by using Path Tracing in Adobe Illustrator. Another way to add some definition is to use the Glowing Edges feature in Photoshop, make it black and white, invert, and darken or multiply:

Turns out I don't like the lines too much. I decided to make them more subtle in Photoshop by blurring them a bit and adding some subtle filters: