smart filters

Turning a Photo into an Ink Drawing or a Pencil Sketch (in Photoshop)

Submitted by LouBrz on 29 November 2011 - 12:15am.

In this article, we'll take a portrait photo and give it a hand-drawn touch by turning it into first an ink drawing (below left) and then a pencil sketch (right). As you can see, this guy is quite surprised at how well the technique works.

Creating an ink drawing or a pencil sketch in Photoshop

We'll start by making the ink effect using a Smart Object, Gaussian Blur, High Pass, the seldom-used Note Paper filter, another round of Gaussian Blur, a Levels adjustment layer, the Multiply blend mode, and a little bit of luminance blending. It's hardly a one-click solution, but the results are amazing. Plus, this flexible approach can produce several interesting alternative looks, including a credible pencil effect, also documented here.

Today's article is based on Deke's Techniques 026 and 027, presented by lynda.com. (The ink effect is also documented in video form on this site.) Read more » 

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Deke’s Techniques 008: Reflecting a Face in Shattered Glass

Submitted by deke on 22 February 2011 - 8:15am.
Deke’s Techniques 008: Reflecting a Face in Shattered Glass

This week I take a photo of an everyday average woman screaming her brains out and double-map her onto a photograph of shattered glass (both from the Fotolia image library). Is she singing so loudly she breaks a mirror? Or is she a photo stuck behind the glass, shouting to get out? I ask those questions twice more inside the video, so please enjoy my repetition. Read more » 

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"Photoshop CS4 Smart Objects" Is Complete

Submitted by deke on 19 September 2009 - 5:38pm.

Update: As of November 6, "Photoshop CS4 Smart Objects" is now available at lynda.com. Members of the lynda.com Online Training Library can check out this link, Photoshop CS4: Smart Objects, for the entire course.

Well friends, more than 1900 of you have voted on my fate. And even tho "Photoshop CS4 for Bio-Medical Imaging Geeks" recently surged to 5 percent (95 votes is none too shabby!), the masses have spoken. "Photoshop CS4 Smart Objects" continues to be the dominant leader.

So I'm hoping the masses will be happy to learn that I have finished filming all 80+ screen-capture movies for this series, ending with the project file shown below. (That's just a detail, of course.) The effect is a combination of nine smart filters--Median, High Pass, and Shadows/Highlights; nested inside Variations and Mezzotint; capped by Find Edges and Emboss; with a measure of Poster Edges and Graphic Pen wrapped up inside the Filter Gallery--all set to different blend modes subject to the whims of two filter masks, a layer mask, and an adjustment layer. In other words, utter simplicity itself.

Nine-filter army Read more » 

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