| |

From Image to Sketch

Posted by Daniel under Basics, Digital Art, Effects, Photo Manips on March 10th, 2008.

If you're new to ComeandPhotoshop.com and like what you see, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed.

There are many ways to achieve this effect in Photoshop but I’m going to show what I believe is the quickest and easiest way to turn a beloved photo into a pencil sketch. Trust me, it’s painless.

Step 1

First off, find a photo. That one is kinda obivous. I’m going with this amazing pic that I found of Evangeline Lilly who plays TV’s Kate Austin on the hit series LOST. Feel free to use this photo as well.
After you have your photo chosen, we need to make a "Duplicate"
layer. Use the shortcut CTRL+J (win) / COMMAND+J (mac)
to do this.

Step 2

Next we need to take the colour out of the layer that we just created.

Image > Adjustments > Desaturate or CTRL+SHIFT+U (win) / COMMAND+SHIFT+U (mac)

Once you have your image, "Desaturated",
make a duplicate of that layer. (CTRL+J (win)
/ COMMAND+J (mac))

Step 3

You should have 3 layers now. "Layer 1 Copy", "Layer 1", & "Background". Now we are going to be working on the "Layer 1 Copy".

Image > Adjustments > Invert or CTRL+I (win) / COMMAND+I
(mac)
This will "Invert" the colours of the image. It looks a little strange but it will not last to long.
Next you want to change the "Layer Blend Mode"
to "Color Dodge".
When it is changed, your image will look white. Along the lines of this…

No need to get excited, your image is still there.

Step 4

This is the last step. See I told you that was going to be quick and painless.

Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur
Here is the trick to this. The lower that you set your blur, the less detailed it will be. The higher you set it, you will lose the effect that you are trying to reach. You need to find that sweet spot. Here are the settings that I used.

Resulting in…

There you have it. A beautiful photo to a pencil sketch. I went ahead and added some texture to it using a "Pattern Filled Adjustment Layer" just to make it look more like it was drawen on paper. Happy Photoshopping.

-daniel

 

Leave a Reply