Another page I want to delete made into a post. This time it’s a Paintshop Pro 7 tutorial for a sketch-like technique for photographs. It was apparently written before I got my iMac. I haven’t used Paintshop Pro in years. Others do though, so I’ll leave it online.

I use Paint Shop Pro 7, but I have no reason to believe this same technique wouldn’t work in any other version. It only used basic commands and things found in a default install of the program. I’m going to assume you know where most of the basic functions can be found, what they are and how they work, mostly because I am too lazy to make and post a bunch of screen captures.

I’m going to turn this:

Into this:

Step one is to pick a photo that isn’t too busy or cluttered with some fairly bold lines and coloration.

Step two is to copy the image and paste it as a new layer, desaturate it by colorizing and setting the saturation to zero. Copy this layer and paste it as a new layer and make a negative image. so far, you should have three layers … the original color image, the black and white copy, and the negative image of the black and white copy.

Next you want to set the top layer’s blending mode to Dodge (from the layer pallet or menu). Don’t panic if the image turns all white or only has a few tiny specks of black on it. That’ll be fixed in with the next step.

Now use a Gaussian Blur on the top layer. I had mine set to 2.0, but you can adjust this to get the effect you want. At this point, mine looked like this:

Make the background layer non-visible and merge the visible layers (the top two). Make the background visible again, and then set the blend mode for the newly merged layer to Luminescence. You should have something that looks like this:

At this point, I played around with the Artistic Effects> Brush Strokes filter until I found a setting that I liked. This step will take you the longest, and you will probably have to create a new setting, as I didn’t think any of the default ones looked all that great. You might want to play around with other filters or effects. In the end, I settled on a somewhat scratchy brush stroke I created a long time ago, and then I fiddled with the contrast settings on the top layer until I liked the way it looked … and ended up with this:

Like I said, I am assuming you are quite familiar with Paint Shop Pro, but it’s such an easy effect, I thought I would share it.