Let’s have a look at some real sketches (portraits this time) to find out what we are going to reproduce and what will make our photos look like a pencil drawing. All drawings used in this tutorial have been made by Andrew Loomis.
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1. The first obvious thing is of course a white background (a paper in a real sketch) with very little detail or no detail at all. Sometimes background is not absolutely white, and the amount of details may vary.Please also notice thick and hard pencil lines that define the basic shapes.
It is usually not a problem to create a nice background in Photoshop, but making attractive pencil outlines is sometimes fairly tricky. |
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2. This sketch is a bit different in style – there is less contrast; please notice some very nice, very soft skin tones.The main Photoshop tools that help to to achieve such a soft look are curves and blur filters. |
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3. In this example we can see clearly the direction of pencil lines that show the skin tone and the shadows. |
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4. Again we can see some strong pencil lines with a well defined direction, used by an artist to emphasize the character of a man.Simulating such ‘directional’ strokes requires some advanced Photoshop techniques. |
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5. One more thing we have to notice is the grainy texture of the pencil or pastel strokes on the paper surface.There are some very effective Photoshop techniques to add a texture to your ‘sketch’.
So these are the things we should try to reproduce by using various Photoshop features to make our photo look like a sketch:
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