Making a photo a sketch

[JoeB]

Agreed - this can get addictive!

So to try to get a more "pencil sketchy" effect I took the original image I posted above and tried another tutorial with slight revisions of my own and came up with these two results - one greyscale and the other the same greyscale but with some of the color of the original showing through for the colorized look.

[photodrawken]

I think that's looking better. What tutorial are you referring to?

[JoeB]

I think that's looking better. What tutorial are you referring to?

The first link posted by @hartpaul. I think I added another PSP pencil sketch somewhere along the way but can't be quite sure what I did because I was experimenting a bit as I went. Didn't exactly follow the same settings as in the tutorial but reasonable close I think. The color original of this, of course, has a lot of dark background. Might look even better with less dark background in the original, but it was the male I was mostly interested in. Using only the sketch tools in PSP as a comparison to using the tut steps kind of distorted his features so that they were a little weird.

I also varied the tutorial by keeping a colored background image (use B&W instead of Greyscale to do that) so as not to do the extra steps of saving the image and then opening the original and having to paste into it.

[photodrawken]

Now that you mention it, something that is not obvious is the importance (in my Step #3) of not simply de-saturating a colour image. It's important for the final result that there are real good tonal values and separation in the B&W image. Use whatever tool you have available to alter the relative tonal values of the colours to get an excellent B&W image that emphasizes the part of the image that you want to be the most important.

In my Ann-Margaret example, there is such a strong reddish colour in her face that simply de-saturating the photo makes her face and hair almost the same value in the B&W image. That's why I darkened the B&W tones of the reds and lightened the B&W tones of the oranges.

[JoeB]

Exactly. Which is why, for example, the script (or any method of trying to do this) will create different types of output that look more or, alternatively, look less like a sketch and also might need different tweaking tools.

The tutorial I was basing my second attempts at starts out being basically the same steps that LeviFiction had laid out. But then it adds the type of effects that you and Levi have been discussing that enhance the lines and kind of break them up and create more of a "dots" - or whatever you want to call it - effect, making it more "sketchy" looking. When I have more time to fool around (and unless someone else decides to do it), just for the fun and because I likely would find the result useful I think I'll do another script with user interaction that incorporates all of this stuff - and maybe add another effect or two that will allow even more flexibility for users to tweak their specific image.

[xfsgpr]

I followed LeviFictions instructions and came with the following picture:

[JoeB]

Nice one - I like the result you got.