There’s plenty of ways to turn a full colour photograph into a crisp line drawing, to prove my point, I already have a video tutorial entitled ‘Photo Sketch’ available on the site which shows you one way to accomplish the task. In this tutorial, I’ll show you a quicker and easier way to produce a similar effect, here goes-
Here’s an image of a New York Taxi-
If you’re a registered user here at 3photoshop you can download the file above. If not, open up one of your own or right click and save the low-quality version above. To magically switch it to a sketch follow the steps below.
First things first, we need to reset our swatches. Go over to the Toolbox and click the little default swatches icon. You can also do this by using the keyboard shortcut CTRL D (CMD + D on the Mac). You should now have a foreground colour of black, and background colour of white.
We’re going to be using a filter to achieve our effect, and so we need to get rid of our background layer (if your image has one). You can do this by holding down the ALT key (OPTION key on the Mac) and double clicking the background. This will switch it to a standard layer capable of accommodating filters.
If you only want a black and white sketch then you can safely skip this step, if you’re after colour then you’ll need to duplicate the background layer by using the keyboard shortcut CTRL J (CMD J on the Mac). Now make sure the newest layer (the one at the top of the stack) is active in the Layers Panel.
Now to add the effect go to Filter -> Stylize -> Find Edges. There’s no dialogue box with this one so you should see the effect apply straight away.
At this point we need to lose the colours so go ahead and select your favourite greyscale converter, or if you’re after a simple solution go to Image -> Adjustment -> Desaturate, or use the keyboard shortcut CTRL + SHIFT + U (CMD + SHIFT + U on the Mac). You should get the effect below-
For a black and white sketch – that’s it! If you want colour, change the blending mode of the top layer in the layers panel to Overlay, then change the opacity of the bottom layer to whatever looks best (a low value is usually best, here I’ve used 20%). You should get an image that looks similar to the one below-
I hope you found this method quick and easy, and don’t forget, if you’re interested in producing high quality sketches from full-colour photographs using an altogether different method then you can watch the video tutorial here.
Thanks for reading, I hope you found it useful.