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Ever seen a mall photobooth create a pencil drawing from a photo?
Automated software and Photoshop filters just give a shot to awkwardly add pencil textures to your images.
Starting With The Right Photograph
Open Photoshop and an image of your choice.
Choosing the right image is not critical, but can give you a better result.
Any image can work, although its best to use images with good contrast, and sharp details.
This image has great shadows and really nice highlights that lend itself to this technique.
You may find that some of your photos will be more successful than others.
Try it out on several to see which ones look the best!
The Tonal Pencil Art Effect
Well begin by making a copy of our background layer.
Right click your Background layer and select Duplicate Layer.
Then double-check that this Background Copy layer is selected, as shown on the right.
With the background layer selected, press
to Desaturate your layer, reducing it to black and white.
Well be referring to this layer as our Color Dodge layer from here on out.
Your image should become harsh and lose some detail.
Press
to invert your Color Dodge layer.
No worries, well soon bring a great image out of this.
This next step can be done at least two different ways.
This effect above was achieved by applying the Motion Blur filter on the Color Dodge Layer.
Find this filter under Filters > Blur > Motion Blur.
Create another copy of your original black and white Background copy layer.
Move it to the top of your layers panel, as shown above right.
With your third copy selected, navigate to Filters > Stylize > Glowing Edges.
Glowing Edges can create a sort of Photoshop filter version of lineart from a photograph.
In other words, these prefs may not work with every image.
The Glowing Edges filter can give a pretty fun effect all by itself.
But we have to transform it one final time before were finished.
Press
to invert the colors.
Set this layer to blending mode Multiply to overlay the dark lines over the pencil drawing.
This is our result!
This is ValeriabyTrey Ratcliff.
Yes, the Trey Ratcliff, available underCreative Commons.
