Convert photos into drawings using Photoshop
Categories: Light room — Tags: Bianco e nero, carboncino, disegno, matita, penna, Pittorialismo, tratto
Translations:
italiano •
Don’t be scared to force your hand. You can start from an excessively contrasted pictures, with some completely black shadows and a completely white face, where lips and eyes protrude with decision. It is not necessary to work with lot of precision, masks can be rude, selections can be not so precise, parts of the picture can be white or black.
There’s no problem even in using an out-of-focus image or a blur one. Actually, a photo you’d usually throw away is acceptable, as a soft photo can give wonderful results with this technique. so, if you have images with technical errors that you’d throw away with particular sadness, you can try this solution. A bad picture can be the base for a splendid drawing.
Preparing the drawing
Tim Shelburne’s tutorial begins creating a base that simulate drawing paper. Once opened and desaturated the image, create a new light-grey fill layer that will be the color of the paper you will use to draw on. Then, let’s go back to New fill layer -> Pattern again. In the second dialogue window, clicking on the arrow next to the icon, open the pattern menu. Clicking on the arrow again, select Greyscale papers. Tim Shelburne suggest the use of Fibers 1 and a Pattern Scale of 340%, to set the layer in Soft Light and 35% of opacity. This is obviously only one of the possibilities. The scale value depend on the image dimension; if it’s big, it is necessary an elevated value. In any case, remember this is a phase that only create a textured surface that seems a drawing paper, so you have to experiment with different patterns, different values, such as opacity and blending mode of the layer itself.
The second step of our tutorial make us building a trace that helps us drawings and that can be used to define the edges of the image. Duplicate the background and put it over all the other layers. To create borders, Tim Shelburne suggests to use the filter “Stylize -> Glowing Edges” with the following values: Edge Width 3, Edge Brightness 11, Smoothness 10; these values are not fundamental for the final image, even because often this layer only helps in the initial phase of the drawing and can be eliminated. Once the filter is applied, the layer must be inverted, to turn it into positive, put it in Multiply as fusion option and about 15% of opacity.
