Pencil Sketches

I envy anyone who can pick up a pencil and transform a blank piece of paper into into a beautiful sketch. I wanted to produce a series of images in a pencil sketch style, using source images from the Great Smokies and nearby areas. There are Photoshop filters that will render an image with a pencil sketch appearance. With these filters you can adjust the settings to change the number of apparent of pencil strokes, as well as the length and thickness of the strokes. For this project I used filters from the Topaz Impressionist filter collection.

When a filter is applied to an image, by moving a few sliders on the filter’s control panel the image will take on a new appearance. In my experience, I get better results when I apply a filter multiple times, using different settings each time, and then blend the results together. This technique involves using layers and layer masks. The image below shows the 16 layers that went into producing the features image at the top of this post.

Starting at the bottom of the stack are three layers, each with different and slightly overlapping views of the same building. The Stitched layer is the result of letting photoshop stitch the three overlapping images into a composite. Using the right equipment when taking the pictures you can stitch together many more than three images and produce a perfectly framed 360 degree panoramic view.

Since I was just holding the camera in my hand and rotating my view for each image, my stitched image has gaps top and bottom (the grey and which checkerboard areas). If you click on the image to the left it will open in a new tab, making it easier to see what I am referring to.

The Exposure layers are adjustment layers that I needed to bring out parts of the fence and waterwheel, because these areas were too bright or too dark in the original images. Because these adjustment layers take the image in opposite directions (one making it brighter and the other making it darker), I needed to apply masks to each of thees layers so that the adjustments were only applied to selected areas of the image.

Often when working on an image I’ll freeze the results of the layers up to this point, before taking the next steps in the process. The Merge & Clone layer is an example of this. I did that here in order to fill in the areas at the top and bottom that were left blank during the stitching process. I was able to clone (copy) parts of the grass and trees to fill the space. Because the end result was going to be a sketch, not a photograph, my cloning didn’t have to be perfect.

In the finished image I want the building to stand out, and the grass foreground and forest background to be less prominent. With the Desaturate layer I lighten and reduce the saturation of these areas of the image.

Up to this point my image is still in color. The Merge 2 layer consolidates all the layers below. Before applying the sketch filters I want to make sure that the image is converted the black and white, so no tell-tale hint of color will come through in the sketch. Photoshop has a nice adjustment layer for doing just that, which is what the B&W Layer is.

As I said earlier in the post I like to apply the same filter multiple times, with different settings, and then blend the results together. Doing this helps me render parts of the image with more and less detail, and it also addresses the fact that one filter setting may not show all parts of the image as good as I would like. The three Sketch Filters are layers where the sketch filter has been applied with different settings to the B&W Layer. Using layer masks I’m able to bring through just the portions of the image that I want into the final product.

Even the sketch filter that I was using needed a little something more around the edges of my main subject, the building and fence. So I applied an Outline Filter from a different family of Topaz filters to get the effect I wanted. An outline filter is in some ways similar to a sketch filter. Also known as an “edge filter” the action performed by this filter is to find all the edges (places where the color or contrast change is abrupt) and replace those edges with a black line, leaving the rest of the image blank.

Almost there! The Merge 3 layer is another consolidation layer, capturing all the visible layers below, and the final layer I’ve called my Edge Effect layer. This final layer is a layer filled with white which I then hide with a layer mask. Using a textured brush around the edges of the layer mask I reveal the edges of the white layer in the finished image. This prevents the pencil lines from extending all the way to the edge of the image, a small touch that I think gives the end product a more hand drawn effect.

Phew! Once again I tip my hat to those people who can take a pencil, paper, and their imagination, to create beautiful hand drawn pencil sketches.