(Slightly Beyond) Photography Basics – Creating a Pencil Sketch Effect

Mickey Rountree

As I usually do, I’m calling this article Beyond Basic because it involves Photoshop and layers. If the idea of layers frightens you, just follow along step by step and you can make this work.

When these articles are converted to PDF and sized for the newsletter, the resolution and quality of the images is seriously degraded. If you would like to read the article and see the images as I did, you can see this article on my website at this link.

https://mickeyrountree.smugmug.com/Articles/Basic-Photography-Series/

We are going to take the normal photographic image below:

And turn it into the pencil sketch below.

Start by opening an image in Photoshop or by sending it to Photoshop from Lightroom. This will be our background image.

Duplicate this layer by entering CTRL J (CMD J if you use a Mac)

Enter CTRL U (CMD U) to desaturate this image. This will bring up the adjustment panel below. Drag the saturation all the way to the left or -100 and hit OK. We now have a Black and white layer.

Duplicate this layer by entering CTRL J (CMD J)

With this new layer selected enter CTRL I (CMD I) to invert it.

Right click on this layer to the right of the thumbnail and select convert to smart object. What this does is allow us to come back to the filter we apply next and change the value until we get the effect we like.

Go to filter/Other/minimum and in the dialog box select 2 PX and preserve squareness.

Change the blend mode of this layer to color dodge

At this point we have a basic black and white pencil sketch. Double clicking on the word “minimum” opens up the minimum filter and we can change the value. I find something between 1 and five usually works, but go ahead and experiment. Here I have used 1, 2, 4, and 6 to show how the image changes. If you like the Black and white sketch go to layers/flatten image and save it.

I usually like to take it a step further and add some color back into the image. To do this I first add a levels adjustment layer. Go to layer/adjustment layer/levels.

Moving the shadow, midtone and highlight cursors will change the brightness of the image and controls how the color layer we add next will look.

Go back to the background layer and use CTRL J (CMD J) to duplicate it. Drag this layer to the top of the layers and change the blend mode to color.

Adjust the levels sliders and the opacity of the color layer until you like the look. Go to layers/flatten image and save your image with a new name. If you think you will use this effect often, you might record all of these steps as an action, so you can do all of these steps with a single click. Actions can be tricky and can be well beyond basic, but do a Google search to learn how.

While I use this effect often on portraits, it works on other types of images as well.