I see some great Photo-challenge results on this site. A good friend of mine uses photos to make dot drawings called "hedcuts". I find these look more like the classical engravings than anything created on a computer. What do you think?

I see some great Photo-challenge results on this site. A good friend of mine uses photos to make dot drawings called "hedcuts". I find these look more like the classical engravings than anything created on a computer. What do you think?

I'd say your friend is exceptionally skilled. Thanks for posting the example and link.

For your first RetouchPRO post, you hit a home run. Welcome and well done.

~Danny~

Amazing stuff. I remember reading an article about this not too long ago . . . ah, here it is:

http://www.npg.si.edu/exh/journal/index.htm

Any tips for us on how this is done? :)

Is the impressionist plug-in used to make photos look like drawings?

Impressionist has a couple presets that might get one going in the drawing direction, but none that would ever come close to true hand-drawn/sketched and shaded artwork. In the example attached, the far right effect was rendered with Impressionist, with a little eye and mouth detail restored with a layer mask.

For one with digital artwork skills far beyond mine, Impressionist might be useful in creating an underpainting or roughed out beginning, if you will, with fine detail added after the fact by the artist. FWIW no plugin or filter or Photoshop action I've ever seen comes close to rendering (to me) realistic drawing effects. Impressionist combined with Corel Painter can render pretty decent painted effects, e.g.

http://www.pbase.com/dannyraphael/image/21885828.jpg

The middle interpretation was rendered using the Andromeda Etchtone plugin.

For reference the attachment examples were created in about 15 minutes of experimenting.

~Danny~

There was a photo-art challenge in the "Challenge" section of RetouchPro awhile back that dealt with hedcuts. You can access it here: http://www.retouchpro.com/challenges/showgallery.php/cat/611

Not nearly as good as your friends, I'm afraid, but some decent ideas.

-Jeff

I just noticed this thread, and the question about a computer connection to something similar. I think Victor Ostromoukhov has done some interesting stuff with computers. But what I find most interesting is his digital facial engraving.

http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~ostrom/

Link to the article itself: http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~ostrom/publications/pdf/SIGGRAPH99_FacialEngraving_1200dpi.pdf

Unfortunately, I have yet to see a way I can run his algorithms on my computer. But I do think Flaming Pear's India Ink does much better than the samples on their site indicate.

http://www.flamingpear.com/indiaink.html

This site has some beautiful Scratchboard illustrations, done with a woodcut or engraving look and several tutorials on the process:

Michael Halbert Illustration (http://www.inkart.com/pages/Tutorial/index.html)

An artist who does WSJ hedcuts has her own site:

http://www.nolinovak.com/index2.html

this reminded me of real-time generated hatching for rendering of 3d models, developed in 2001 by Emil Praun, Hugues Hoppe, Matthew Webb, and Adam Finkelstein... see the attachment for a sample...

project page: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/gfx/proj/hatching/
Hugues Hoppe: http://research.microsoft.com/~hoppe/
Adam Finkelstein: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~af/


also on similar note:
Pen-and-ink textures for real-time rendering ( http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/686219.html )
Hardware Accelerated Real Time Charcoal Rendering ( http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/majumder02hardware.html )
Computer-Generated Pen-and-Ink Illustration ( http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/winkenbach94computergenerated.html )

Another method (labor intensive, but effective).

http://www.photoshoptechniques.com/forum/showthread.php?t=956&page=2&pp=10

Starts with post 14.