Convert photos into drawings using Photoshop
Categories: Light room — Tags: Bianco e nero, carboncino, disegno, matita, penna, Pittorialismo, tratto
Translations:
italiano •
Using these options, it’s easy to mark a huge part of the image. As you build your drawing, it is important to insist on those parts you want to darken, for example not passing the brush on the bright parts, such as the skin. If you exaggerate with all these passages that reveal the photo underneath, you loose the effect of the desired pencil or pen drawing. Insisting on all the dark parts, the effect is extremely convincing. I suggest to mix the random direction of the mark with unidirectional passages, in order to create a certain coherence, a preferred direction for the drawing. It can be useful to add hand marks, with brushes such as Dry Media ones: in this case the effect is more similar to charcoal drawings than pen or pencil ones.
As your drawing take form, it is better to start interpret the image, leaving some zones clearer and darken others, creating some zones with a littler density of mark or leaving some zones totally uncompleted. Consciously select where to apply marks is fundamental for a good result of the drawing.
Drawing finishes
At a certain point, it is impossible to keep on applying the cross-hatching, otherwise the noisy photo is completely revealed. Usually this is the point where I want to modify the image again, in a creative manner, re-invent the matter in front of me. From the moment where you start transforming a photo into a drawing, you must be brave and be ready to draw for real.
As free hand drawing can be difficult, press Ctrl+Shift+Alt+E to copy a snapshot of your pictures into a new layer. Reduce the opacity of the brush and add hand made cross-hatching where you want to adjust the image, such as shadows to cover elements you didn’t want, for example in the background, or to give some more substance in the high lights. This is absolutely the most difficult part, but even the most funny. The image in the article shows a fine cross-hatching on the face, in a way to recover details but cover background, hands, hair as the face emerge from the black of the drawing.
Once you reached this point, I suggest to duplicate your image once again, with Ctrl+Shift+Alt+E, and put it in Multiply fusion modality. This option darken the image, sometime even too much, but it can be useful to give strength to your drawing. This leads you to deep black as in the original image an effect otherwise impossible. In fact to have achieve this goal, you should scratch the entire mask, but this way you would reveal the picture underneath. To maintain a sort of drawing effect, leave some white spaces between the marks, that enlighten the image. Adding this layer deepens the black color, conserving the cross-hatching effect. Let’s pretend that the layer gives an effect similar to pen or charcoal drawings, while our drawing looks like an hard pencil one. Modifying the layer opacity brings to the desired effect and the right compromise between intensity and tonal gamma of the image. Now, I suggest to slightly regulate contrast and brightness, with a simple adjustment curve.
Your drawing is now ready. It is possible anyway to play around with some effects again. There are infinite way to colour monochromatic images, so you just have to choose the one you prefer.
Conclusions
The illustrated tutorial allows a quick and efficacious transformation of a photography into a pen or pencil drawing. You can find some examples of images modified with this technique on my photoblog, under the tag Drawing.
Moreover, it is possible to find a CS3 Photoshop action, pencil drawing, that automatize the majority of the work detailed in this article.
