How to make BGs like Ryukishi

 I had once attempted to do Backgrounds like Ryukishi's original PC photo ones. It doesn't look that hard, right? WRONG. I was lost and in the end did something that just kind of reminded me of them. Of course, I was sad but in the end, I forgot about it, till yesterday when I was doing a project in Powerpoint. I had to edit a photo so it wouldn't look as odd and decided to go into the artistic effects and lo and behold, there I made an amazing discovery.

POWERPOINT I

We'll start with this picture

(btw this is actually a picture of Shirakawa-go, the village that inspired Hinamizawa, and in which the pics were taken)

1. add it to Powerpoint, and go to picture format. 

2. pick artistic effect -> paint strokes (the second one on the second row)

3. right click on the photo and click format picture

4. there go to picture corrections and put:

•  the sharpness at -10%
•  the brightness at 25% 
•  the contrast at -53%

At this moment the photo will look like this.

If you want you can leave it like this, but I decided to refine it even more.

POSTERIZE

Here I did one simple step, which was googling posterize image online and put the photo in the first site that popped up. The one I used is this one -> https://pinetools.com/posterize-image

Here, I went ahead and set the level to 15 and hit posterize.

This is how it looked.

And here comes the last step.

POWERPOINT II

Here I added it back to Powerpoint, and did the following:

1. right click on the photo and click format picture

2. I changed the brightness to 11% and contrast to -10% 

3. I added the artistic effect -> paint brush ( third, second row)

4. after that, while still on the artistic effect tab, I pressed artistic effect options (if you cannot find it you can search it in the powerpoint search bar - the "tell me what you want to do") 

5. and finally I put the transparency on 70% and brush size on 6

And the final result looked like this.

Anyways hope this helps, bye bye ><!!