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Transform a photo into a drawing

Elena Santos

Elena Santos

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If you’re artistically challenged, there’s a lot you can do about it: enroll in art courses, try to learn by yourself with DIY books or just grab hold of Photoshop. Yes, the digital image editor can also be used as an artistic brush enabling you, for example, to turn a photo into a drawing with just a few adjustments. Want to know how? Follow these easy steps and free your inner artist.Open the photo you’ll be working with and desaturate it, that is, make it a black and white picture. You can do this either by the Image > Adjustments > Desaturate menu or just by clicking Shift+Ctrl+U.

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Duplicate the background layer and invert it, again with Image > Adjustments > Invert or with Ctrl+I.

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Select the layer you just duplicated and change the blending to Color dodge. The image will be almost totally blank, but don’t worry! It’ll look fine.

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Now go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur and apply this effect to your photo. Toy a bit with the radius value until you obtain the desired result. In our case we set a 4-pixel radius.

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Add a new levels layer (Layer > New adjustment layer > Levels) and set the values to something similar to 75 – 1,00 – 255. The final values will depend on the effect you want to obtain. Just keep on moving the sliders until you like what you see.

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The final touch: duplicate the first layer (the one you desaturated) and change its blending to Pin Light. Then adjust the opacity level to finally obtain a drawing-like photo.

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And here’s the result. Easy as pie! Why don’t you try for yourself?

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Elena Santos

Elena Santos

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