A Picture Sketch Effect

Converting a photograph into a sketch or painting. However, We will show you a few tricks on how to expand this effect to meet your needs along the way.

Step 1: First, find a suitable photograph.

Step 2: Duplicate the sunflower photograph layer (Ctrl/Cmd + J). Then desaturate the duplicate (Image > Adjustments > Desaturate or Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + U). Name this layer DESATURATE. Then duplicate the desaturate layer and invert the new one (Ctrl/Cmd + I). Name this layer INVERT. You are layers palette should now look like this.

At this point, your image should look similar to this one.

Step 3: Change the blending mode of the INVERT layer to Color Dodge. You should now not be able to see many details in your image.

Step 4:Make the INVERT layer active by clicking once on it and choose Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. Enter a setting between 2-3 pixels. At this point, you could stop here if you chose, and you would have a great pencil sketched look to your image.

Step 5: If you are moving on then click once on the INVERT layer and merge it with the DESATURATE layer by pressing Ctrl/Cmd + E. Then change the Blend mode of this new layer to Luminosity.

Step 6: Great, almost done. Finally, you have a few choices of filters to run on this layer. Chose Filter > Artistic > Fresco with the following settings.

Step 7:The image looks great but there is one more trick. Often the filters we ran on the image gave me too strong of a painterly effect. To weaken it, right after you run the filter choose Edit > Fade (Your filter Name). Enter the following settings into the dialog box and click OK.

Now its looks like a great Effect!

More: Photo Effects Tutorials