Written By Steve Patterson, Photoshop Essentials.com
In this Adobe Photoshop tutorial, we'll see how you can impress your friends, family or clients with your amazing art skills without lifting a pencil by easily converting any photo into a sketch in just six easy steps.
A couple of duplicated layers and keyboard shortcuts, a layer blend mode, the Gaussian blur filter and about one minute out of your day are all it takes.
Let's get started. I'll be using Photoshop CS2 here, but any recent version of the program will work just fine.
Here's the photo I'll be using for this tutorial:
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Step 1: Duplicate The Background Layer
With my photo newly opened inside Photoshop, I currently have one layer, my Background layer, which contains my image:
The first step in creating this sketch effect is to duplicate this layer, and the easiest way to do that is with the keyboard shortcut, Ctrl+J (Win) / Command+J (Mac). This gives me my copy of the Background layer, as we can see in the Layers palette:
Step 2: Desaturate The Layer
The second step is to desaturate this newly created layer (which Photoshop has named "Layer 1"). Now there's plenty of ways to get professional quality black and white conversions of images, but that's overkill for what we're doing here. All we need is a quick way to remove the colors from the image, and the quickest way to do that is to desaturate the image using the keyboard shortcut, Shift+Ctrl+U (Win) / Shift+Command+U (Mac).
Step 3: Duplicate The Desaturated Layer
Next, we need a copy of this desaturated layer, so once again, let's use the handy keyboard shortcut, Ctrl+J (Win) / Command+J (Mac):
Step 4: Invert The Layer
Now that we have a copy of the desaturated layer, we need to invert it, which basically means we're going to swap the light and dark areas, so black becomes white, white becomes black, darker shades of gray become lighter and lighter ones become darker. Again, we can use a keyboard shortcut for this, Ctrl+I (Win) / Command+I (Mac). This gives us what looks like a "negative" version of the image:
Step 5: Change The Blend Mode Of The Inverted Layer To 'Color Dodge'
With the top layer (the inverted layer) still selected in the Layers palette, change the blend mode for this layer from "Normal" to "Color Dodge". You can do that by going up to the top of the Layers palette and clicking on the down-pointing arrow to the right of the word "Normal", and then select "Color Dodge" from the drop-down list:
This will temporarily turn the image white:
Step 6: Apply The Gaussian Blur Filter To The Color Dodge Layer
And here we are already at step six, the final step to giving us our sketch effect. All we need to do at this point is apply a Gaussian Blur to the Color Dodge layer.
To do that, with the Color Dodge layer (the top layer) selected in the Layers palette, go up to the Filter menu at the top of the screen, select Blur and then select Gaussian Blur from the list of blur filters:
Blur > Gaussian Blur"> This brings up the Gaussian Blur dialog box:
The key to achieving a nice sketch effect here is to adjust the Radius amount at the bottom of the Gaussian Blur dialog box until your image looks like a sketch. The easiest way to adjust it is to click on the slider bar at the very bottom and drag it with your mouse. As you can see in my screenshot above, the preview area in the Gaussian Blur dialog box won't do you much good here because it's still showing the inverted image, so you'll want to keep an eye on the image itself as you're dragging the Radius value left and right. Generally speaking, a lower Radius value works best. If you set the value too high, you'll overdo it and lose the effect.
I'm using a low resolution image for this tutorial, so for me, a Radius value of about 1 pixel gives me a nice sketch effect. You'll most likely be working on a much higher resolution photo, and in that case, you may find that a Radius value of around 4 or 5 gives you the desired results.
Here's the original photo once again, before we started working towards the effect:
And here's the result of my sketch effect:
If you're happy with your sketch effect, you can stop here. If you find, as I'm finding with my image, that the effect appears too light and could use some darkening to give it better contrast, finish up with these next couple of steps. Don't worry, they only add a few more seconds to the whole process.
As I stated on the previous page, these next few steps in the tutorial are completely optional, but if you find your sketch is a bit on the light side, here's an easy way to make it darker and give it more contrast. We could use Levels or Curves here to darken it, but that's just adding complexity to an otherwise very simple effect. No need for that.
Step 7 (Optional): Merge All Layers Into A Single Layer
With the top layer still selected, use the keyboard shortcut Shift+Ctrl+Alt+E (Win) / Shift+Command+Option+E (Mac) to quickly merge all of your layers in the Layers palette onto a new layer at the top of the stack:
Step 8 (Optional): Change The Blend Mode Of The Merged Layer To 'Multiply'
With the new merged layer selected in the Layers palette, go back up to the blend mode options and this time, change the blend mode from "Normal" to "Multiply":
The Multiply blend mode makes everything darker, and as soon as you select Multiply for the merged layer, your sketch effect will become darker, giving it better contrast.
Step 9 (Optional): Fine-Tune The Darkening Amount By Lowering The Opacity
If you think your sketch effect is now too dark,you can easily adjust the amount of darkening to your liking by lowering the opacity value of the merged layer. Simply go up to the Opacity value in the top right corner of the Layers palette, move your mouse directly over the word "Opacity", which turns your mouse icon into Photoshop's "scrubby sliders", and then click and drag your mouse to the left to lower the opacity value. I'm going to lower mine here to a value of 60%:
And here's my final result:
And you're done!
1 comment:
great finished, thanks
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