Photo Effects: Turn A Photo To A Sketch
Learn Photoshop with Photo Effects Tutorials at Photoshop Essentials.com
Written By Steve Patterson, Photoshop Essentials.com
In this Adobe Photoshop tutorial, we'll see how you can impress your friends, family or clients with your amazing art skills without lifting a pencil by easily converting any photo into a sketch in just six easy steps.
A couple of duplicated layers and keyboard shortcuts, a layer blend mode, the Gaussian blur filter and about one minute out of your day are all it takes.
Let's get started. I'll be using Photoshop CS2 here, but any recent version of the program will work just fine.
Here's the photo I'll be using for this tutorial:
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Step 1: Duplicate The Background Layer
With my photo newly opened inside Photoshop, I currently have one layer, my Background layer, which contains my image:
The first step in creating this sketch effect is to duplicate this layer, and the easiest way to do that is with the keyboard shortcut, Ctrl+J (Win) / Command+J (Mac). This gives me my copy of the Background layer, as we can see in the Layers palette:
Step 2: Desaturate The Layer
The second step is to desaturate this newly created layer (which Photoshop has named "Layer 1"). Now there's plenty of ways to get professional quality black and white conversions of images, but that's overkill for what we're doing here. All we need is a quick way to remove the colors from the image, and the quickest way to do that is to desaturate the image using the keyboard shortcut, Shift+Ctrl+U (Win) / Shift+Command+U (Mac).
Step 3: Duplicate The Desaturated Layer
Next, we need a copy of this desaturated layer, so once again, let's use the handy keyboard shortcut, Ctrl+J (Win) / Command+J (Mac):
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