Mama’s Pencil Sketch

Hi! This is Mama Shan with another video tutorial. I am going to show you how to turn a color image into a black and white image that looks kind of like a sketch and we will blow out the background. And I would like to thank Maverick Photography for use of the image and also the tutorial request.

So this is what we are aiming for. This is done on a little bit higher resolution image than the one I am working with here. But we are going to start out with the color image and get our Layers Pallet over here and just duplicate the background layer. So I am going to use a lot of shortcuts in this tutorial just to emphasize how quickly you can do this. So Ctrl J to copy on a PC, that will be command J on a Macintosh. And then desaturate this copy layer by pressing Shift Ctrl U on a PC, Shift command U on a Macintosh. And then we are going to duplicate this layer again. So just press Ctrl J on a PC, command J on a Macintosh.

Now this top layer that we have created, we are going to change its blending mode from normal to color dodge. So select color dodge down here, and we are going to invert it, Ctrl I on a PC, command I on a Macintosh. Your window will look totally white or almost totally white. Then we are going to the Filter Menu to blur and go to Gaussian Blur, Gaussian Blur. You can use a variety of these blurs to do this. This is the basic concept. This one is going to do it the quickest. And let me bring this all the way down to a zero radius and start bringing it in for you.

You can see that when you dial this in, we are getting kind of just pencil outlines at this point. But what we want to do is we want to go for the tone like rubbed graphite. So I am going to give it a high amount of Gaussian Blur and click Okay.

Now the next thing I am going to do is add a levels adjustment layer, come down to the bottom of the Layers Pallet and click on the black and white circle icon and just choose Levels and bring that up over here. And I am going to take the Gamma Slider; I am going to brighten it just a little bit so you take the middle Gamma Slider under the input levels and push it over to the left.

Now do not worry. There are some areas here that are more blown out than others. We are going to bring back that detail in a second and I am going to show you how. I am going to click Okay.

Now I am going to click back on the layer one copy layer here because I want to bring some detail back into the hat area. So grab a soft round airbrush, click on your Brush Tool from the tool box, then go up to the options bar, and click on that downward triangle and you can scroll to see the styles of brushes that are in Photoshop by default. You want to scroll down the airbrush type style. These are my favorite type brushes.

And also on the options for the opacity for the brush, we are going to take it down a notch, maybe around 12% to start off with. Now this is a layer that is in color dodge mode. So when we paint with black on it, it is going to make things darker. When we paint with white on it, it is going to make things lighter, of course. And I have black as the foreground color. If I wanted to put more detail round that nose, I am just going to click. Just one little click and I have got more detail round that nose.

I am going to make my brush smaller by clicking on my left square bracket key which is right next to the P key on the keyboard, and just tap, tap, tap, to get more detail in those lips like that. Maybe a little bit under the nose, a little bit more definition there, over here, so you can kind of paint in where you want that detail.

Conversely, you can hit the x key so that the foreground switches to white, and come in here and blow out the things that you do not want. I want to do that a little quicker so I am going to increase the opacity to a 100% for this one. Use the right bracket key to increase my brush and just paint away, and undo that for a minute, I got a little bit too close. The airbrush does have a spread on it. So I will make my brush a little bit smaller with the left bracket key when I g